A Well Pump Failure Dry Run, by Major Dad

My wife and I woke up on Christmas morning to discover that we had no running water in our Alaskan home.  When we checked out the problem, we discovered that the pump to our well was not functioning.  Waking up to find we had fuses blown and mud in the water lines is always great news, especially on Christmas morning.  It seems that some recent small earthquakes in our area had messed with our water table, and where once we had water, now we have silt, sand and mud.  Of course, all of this comes to light on Christmas Day when all the stores and businesses were closed.  So we got to spend at least a weekend without running water, and who knows how many more until we could get the well up and running again.   Fortunately, my wife and I have been in a "prepper" mindset for many years and so we were able to go on with Christmas pretty much as planned except for having to heat water on the stove to do the dishes and restricting our intake of ice from the ice maker.    As "preppers" we have always made it a point to store extra water as well as food in the house.  We keep several 5 gallon water jugs in our basement and rotate the water in them every 6 months (spring / fall).  

In addition to those I have a hot/cold water dispenser in my home office which holds a 5 gallon jug of water, and we also keep replacement jugs for it as well.  We also have about thirty plastic 2-liter “Coke” bottles that we have washed and refilled with water for emergency purposes.   

We found that the  2-liter bottles are great for around the house use as they are lightweight and highly portable. Also since we are reusing them after drinking the original product, they are a very inexpensive way to store water for emergencies.   They have worked out great for us by keeping one near the kitchen and one near the bathroom sinks to pour water in plastic basins to wash our hands, to fill cups for brushing our teeth and rinsing as well as other mundane things.  They are a lot easier to handle than the large 5-gallon containers, as you can lift and pour from the bottles with one hand, and the 2-liter bottle does not take up much room if you have limited counter space.   

The 5-gallon jugs worked well for larger tasks such as filling larger items such as cooking pots, dishpans (to wash dishes), toilet tanks etc., but we were amazed how handy the 2-liter bottles were.    As with any time we exercise our “bug-in” scenarios, we almost always learn a couple of lessons.  Here are a few things which we learned from this “dry run” (pun intended).    

Lesson 1.    The commonly suggested storage of 2 gallons of water per person per day is not enough unless you have an outhouse.  Even using the old standard “If its yellow let it mellow and if it’s brown, flush it down” with a one gallon flush tank toilet – the two gallons per person per day wisdom pretty much goes out the window.  Two gallons per person per day is enough to eat, drink, wash the dishes and to take care of personal cleanliness, but if you plan to use flush toilets, one needs to plan to store more water.  

Lesson 2.  It is more difficult and takes more effort to make usable water from ice and snow then it first seems.  My wife and I have set aside what we thought was a lot of water for drinking and washing in the case of an emergency/  We have stored well above the 2-gallon per person, per day rule figuring we had enough potable water for at least a few weeks.  We also thought that since we live in Alaska , in the case of an emergency where we lost power or water, we would be able to melt enough snow and ice to extend the amount we had stored for a much longer period. What we discovered is that it took a lot more effort than what we thought simply to produce enough water from ice and snow to fill the toilet tanks at least twice a day.   

With the well pump burned out, and no running water in the house we thought we would simply use our stored water for normal uses but that we would take this opportunity to test the theory of using snow and ice to extend our water supply by using it to fill up our toilet tanks.  What we found out is that it takes quite a bit of time to chop enough ice to be ready to fill two tanks with melt water to meet out “twice a day” fill standard.   We started off chopping ice and filling a pot to melt it down.  However, chopping ice produced a lot more smaller pieces and flakes of ice than large chunks, so it took longer than what we expected to get a bucket full of ice.   Since that took longer than expected, we thought we would try an experiment of just gathering up “clean” snow from some places near the house.  Since we have about 3 feet of snow lying everywhere on the ground and even more in drifts, there seemed to be great potential in using snow.  But in actuality, we found that the results of using snow are hardly worth the effort unless you are in a last resort- nothing else to use situation.  No matter how clean the snow looked, it always contained lots of particles in it.  These particles looked like pieces of leaves and seeds from trees and weeds and needed be strained out after melting and prior to the water being poured into the commode so that the pieces would not stop up any part of the toilet or plumbing    

To strain the water, I decided to use four paper binder clips from my office to hold a piece of cloth over a 5 gallon bucket.  The cloth acted as my strainer to catch most of the larger particles and seeds.  This worked well, but having to go in and out of the house many times to gather enough snow, melt it and then strain it, took a lot of time in order to get the required amount of water to fill both toilet tanks and have a reserve bucket standing by to refill after a the inevitable flush.   The snow melting technique can be used in an emergency situation; I did it today.   But I have made a mental note to make this method my last resort since we have tried it for real.  Retrieving ice, even though it was more difficult than first thought, works a lot better than using snow in that there were many fewer trips in and out of the house.  But one thing we noticed is that even the ice melt still had to be strained as it also contained some seeds and bits of leaves.  Also, after melting both the ice and the snow, the melt water looked a bit tinted.   

Since we had the use of our household power; we were able to use a burner on the stove to speed up the ice / snow melt process.  I think that part of the tint we noticed in the melt water occurred during the heating/melting of the water which caused some tannic acid to leach from the bits of trees that were in the snow and ice into the water.   Since the melt water was not going to be consumed today, we didn’t do anything else with it other than store it to put it in the commode tanks.   If we planned to drink the water we would have either poured the melt-water through a Berkey or took it through a distilling process so we would have known for sure that it was safe to drink.  

If we didn’t have outside electrical power to our house to provide the quick melt heat source, I’m not so sure that I would have used up our valuable stored fuel supply to just melt snow for the toilets, unless I was sure of being able to quickly replace it.  In a true grid down situation using your finite amount of cooking fuel just to melt snow would not be a good trade off in my opinion.  If we had been grid down, I would have put the ice in metal buckets by the fireplace and let it melt in them. However that would have taken a lot more time to get the required amount of water than the way we did it with the stove.  I did however make a note to myself to secure a couple more metal buckets just for the purpose of melting snow and ice by the fireplace in case of a future episode like this occurs.  If I had to use the fireplace method during this episode, I would have had to use my fireplace ash-hauling buckets for the purpose of melting water.  

I think I would rather have some clean steel buckets set aside for ice melting rather than having to clean ashes before I could use them.  I have extra plastic buckets but I would not be able to place them as close to the fireplace as the metal ones.   Today we simply used this untimely incident to explore the possibility of melting ice and snow for emergency water use.  What we discovered was that if we had to depend on this apparently abundant source of water, it would take a lot more effort than what we first thought to convert it to a usable form in a timely manner, especially if it was to be our only source of water.  Therefore we need to re-examine our thinking and materials in order to be able to better use the resources we have available.  

I am thankful this Christmas for many things.  I thank God for a great wife, my two sons and their families, a warm place to live, and for God giving me enough vision to plan ahead and prepare for a time when life may not be as comfortable as it is now.  I also am thankful that our house had power.  If the power was out and we had to cook on a camp stove rather than a range, it would have been a much more difficult day than what it was.    Finally, I thank God I was able to learn some lessons today which may help me some other day; and I thank Him that what could have been a major problem was not much more than a minor inconvenience.    I hope everyone’s Christmas was as good as the Christmas we had here in Alaska.