RB2 - nice system man! I have similar things going on here, but am finally also lucky enough to own the springs themselves, so the water can be had pure as can be with no treatment - you just have to avoid getting it during hard rains and flash floods when it's full of junk carried on the big flow. That's why I use the truck/drum/pump system to bring up a lot at a time when it's super nice. I get fine results with just that floating pickup I detailed elsewhere. Filters can collect stuff that rots in there...
I am also simply collecting rain. When I first moved to Floyd, this was a BAD idea, the water was PH 4 or thereabouts - sulfur, nitrites and so on from coal plants to the west in Ohio, but the EPA actually seems to have done some good on that one. Now it's ph 7 all the time, and other than two months - one in spring, one in fall - pollen free and ready to go as is. I calculate that if I built a big enough cistern, the rain alone would do the job for me - but I use a LOT less water than most people. One toilet flush a day (which can be any quality of water), cooking - hardly any, a cup of tea and maybe make a casserole - washing dishes (any quality water - you dry them).
I bathe in about 5 gallons from a bucket I heat with one of the tank heaters from my electroplating setup...not too often, just enough to not smell bad.
Next time I fix up the pressurized system, I'll see if my water heater survived, it probably did, but the bucket is fine with me.
I use an ancient Maytag wringer retrofitted with a 1/6 hp motor to wash clothes. Rainwater (super soft) gets them clean better than the neighbors who use well water and $1000 machines. Line dry them of course - if it rains, I just get a fresher rinse.
Note, this is all by choice. I had a more complete system - 2 of my four buildings on campus with pumped water from taps at one point (including hot), but those oddball weather changes froze most of that - there were domestic issues with keeping some of the basements "tight" enough not to freeze in a cold snap, and I got tired of keeping up with the repairs required due to the malfeasance of others who used to live here.
Making water just a little harder to get than twisting a knob makes you think about it a lot more, and use a heck of a lot less of the stuff. You have to have a little, but twice daily hollywood showers are not a need - they are a luxury. And actually, not that good for you and your skin. Insects (biting types) are attracted to the deodorant soap/detergent smell, for what that's worth.
One issue here is that if I drill a well in the not-midnight-special manner, the building permit I have to get and show to get a well driller to do it raises my taxes from the rate on 4 worthless "barns" to that on four fine homes - I've not decided that the government deserves that much money from me yearly for well, nothing in return.
Here, we have rock - so the cool pressure washer method won't work. It's good for getting trenches dug to bury pipes, though, but the tree roots mean you still do one heck of a lot of labor per foot of buried pipe. Of course, you have to bootstrap having enough water in the first place to run a pressure washer.
Some municipalities figure that every drop of water you bring in, they have to waste treat going out - and that's one of the reasons they charge you so much for that. Here, we all just have a drainfield so it's more an issue of how much it would cost to run a pipe from the city to here through the mountains - it's too much, so no one does that.
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I'd take some slight exception to dragonfly's remarks above. Plasticizers are surely bad for you - some of them act like hormones - and some of them are almost as potent as the ones you get in most treated city water from drugs people put into the waste system coming back around. That isn't cumulative anymore than your salt intake is, but it's bad enough anyway. Some plastic doesn't have plasticizers put in it and it doesn't turn opaque and fall to dust when it's all gone either. That's bunk for a case like a solar distiller window where it never needed to be flexible at all.
This is the trouble with scientific facts - the truth is never so simple as "plastic is bad, and avoiding it saves you" - nope, there are plenty of other things with similar characteristics to avoid - or decide to accept, even completely "natural" things, just as bad, and you can't avoid them all and still live on this planet. Forests emit ethylene sometimes in dangerous amounts!
Ask any organic gardener about plastic and decomposing - or not - it's a big issue for them because it DOESN'T and stays around in the soil "forever" ruining it for agriculture. Plastic diapers are filling up all our landfills - permanently.
The rise of diabetes might well be tied into this, but obesity is the usual stated cause, as it exercises the same body chemistry that fails in diabetes. I've not seen the studies that indicate this plastic trigger - but I would also not discard the possibility out of hand either. It's one of those "could be" things for sure. Could be the other hormones those on city water get just as easily. Or something completely else, like a better detection and reporting regime than in the past. I for one have noticed since a good while back that almost everyone in the small engine business winds up with bad diabetes even more prevalent than in the population at large - gasoline exposure seems to be the culprit there, since you are very much exposed all the time in that business. Some of those additives are truly wicked stuff chemically.
Every customer of course brings in their broken thing with a full tank of gas - they always try that first, and you have to get rid of it to work on their unit...somehow.
Radiation in low doses IS NOT cumulative, other than that the risk of a single fatal mutation that isn't corrected is the same for each independent event of absorbed ionizing radiation - whether it be UV, X rays, Gamma rays, or charged particles - the energy of the event is of course a factor. In other words, the more times you flip a coin, the more chances you have of getting "tails" - or 3 in a certain complex pattern. That's it.
DNA has an extremely wondrous error detection and correction system that has many aspects - from the paired strands to the self destruct trigger for whole cells when something goes wrong, it's much more amazing than the number theory stuff used in error correction in computer work - there are a number of levels of checking and correcting, with a kill the cell fallback when all else fails. It takes roughly three mutations in a single DNA to create cancer -- and you have to get those three (the p53 gene being a major one, it's the one that controls commanded cell death), without causing the cell death triggered by them or any other mutations that trigger it, quite a few. The numbers of damaged DNA per cancer is astronomical even in scientific notation - a large two digit exponent.
There is one other effect. Despite the error correction and cell death mechanism we have built in, enough radiation damage in a short time will kill you outright - all those dead cells are too much for the body to flush and live without. This is the opposite effect of cumulative. A number of rads that would kill you right now, if delivered in an hour, won't have any effect you can notice if spread out over a lifetime. That's measured and tested fact all over the business.
I DO have access to studies on what's called hormesis - the theory that by causing the more prone to mutate cells to self destruct, a little radiation is good for you.
While still a fight - there always will be as people like to fear-monger - there's good evidence this is the true case, it's just not something to worry about, especially after reaching a certain age level - if something causes a 1% rise in your chance of cancer 50 years from now - and you're already 60 years old, why worry about it? That's just silly. Your kids - different story of course.
The ultra conservative LNT theory used by the UN to scare people about radiation is surely just wrong - sorry. Without some mutations, we'd still all be single celled for one thing.
It's just part of that bubble wrap world theory. Better safe than sorry taken to a ridiculous extreme.