Water outages

[Woody girl]

I've got a spring-fed stream. (Currently a very full stream, glad I cleared the trash grate this morning given the weather). Never dried up even in driest summers. Also some water butts filled with stream water- 4 x 250L- and at the bottom of my Willow chest freezer, I have a dozen 5L bags of drinking water. Being frozen and in the dark, it not go off, and is doing sterling duty maintaining freezer temp as the willow only takes up half the space. (It was put in primarily to maintain freezer temp, then I realised it was also useful spare drinking water, it is in proper water containers).

Our mains water is pumped up the hill, whilst we are at a level where the mains pressure is enough to provide it, if the pump fails/they forget to turn it back on after routine servicing/it trips and doesn't come back on line etc, then the houses above us lose their water. You know when it's happened as the water is very aerated when the pump restarts. Not unusual for it to happen, on average once a month. So I'm conscious of what our alternatives might be if we were ever affected.

(On my "to get" list is a water filter. Or maybe a big pack of activated charcoal to make a filter butt).

We have private drainage, a downstairs loo and a dirty water pump which will lift water out of the stream and plenty of hose. So if we lost mains for a few days, could rig that to pump water into the loo cistern, would use a bucket if it was just a day or two. (There's probably enough head for flow without a pump, but that would involve a lot more piping and would pose other challenges....). If all else fails, I have the composting loo out of my van, plenty soak for it and plenty space to dispose of the liquid bottle contents.

Hot water wise: have a big Maslin pan for jam-making, so could boil a gallon a time- just pop it on the Rayburn and leave it for a while. Fine for a strip wash and washing up.

Not perfect but a big improvement on what we had before we moved here.

GC

Sounds like you've got most bases covered.

When I think that only 100 yrs ago most places only had an outdoor hand pump, often shared with other households, with only cold water, and heating water on open, or coal fires. long drops for other needs. It makes me grateful.
We realy have it so easy in today's world.

 

[Nice65]

Public bodies seem to constantly be making a mess of things, just look at what a basic error the OBR did by publishing the budget before it was announced. That probably cost some people many millions.

The conspiracy theorist in me also thinks it may have made some people many millions, and that it may not have been an error. The explanation was vague and poor.

 

[Keith_Beef]

When I think that only 100 yrs ago most places only had an outdoor hand pump, often shared with other households, with only cold water, and heating water on open, or coal fires. long drops for other needs.

I think that you'd have to go back a bit further than 100 years to find that in cities.

In Sheffield, at least I'm the parts that I know best, slum clearance was planned from 1935 to get rid of the last of the "crofts" (small, Sicily built houses crowded around a yard with a water pump as you described). Then the war stopped that, until 1955. 7,000 houses and 30,000 people would have been affected by the last wave of slum clearance.

But already from at least as late as 1910, and very likely earlier (1890s), there were massive house building projects; most of these were two-up (upstairs bedrooms), two-down (front room and back room) plus offshot kitchen with an outside toilet connected to mains sewerage.

My mother's father bought his house in one of these areas and had an indoor trolley and bathroom added, and an immersion heater for hot water. I just remember the coal fire with Yorkshire range, and the kitchen was practically unchanged when my grandmother had to go into a nursing home in the mid 1990s.

 

[slowworm]

The conspiracy theorist in me also thinks it may have made some people many millions, and that it may not have been an error. The explanation was vague and poor.

It seemed to he a simple matter of uploading the documents early, using a date based name that was very easy to guess and not locking the folder. Something even the most basically IT literate person should have known not to do.

Something more relevant is the fiasco with the EA and the fly tipping in Oxfordshire. Multiple sound bites from no end of people but nothing meaningful done to stop months of fly tipping.

 

[Woody girl]

I think that you'd have to go back a bit further than 100 years to find that in cities.

In Sheffield, at least I'm the parts that I know best, slum clearance was planned from 1935 to get rid of the last of the "crofts" (small, Sicily built houses crowded around a yard with a water pump as you described). Then the war stopped that, until 1955. 7,000 houses and 30,000 people would have been affected by the last wave of slum clearance.

But already from at least as late as 1910, and very likely earlier (1890s), there were massive house building projects; most of these were two-up (upstairs bedrooms), two-down (front room and back room) plus offshot kitchen with an outside toilet connected to mains sewerage.

My mother's father bought his house in one of these areas and had an indoor trolley and bathroom added, and an immersion heater for hot water. I just remember the coal fire with Yorkshire range, and the kitchen was practically unchanged when my grandmother had to go into a nursing home in the mid 1990s.

Not where I live. Maybe big towns and cities, but in more rural areas not so much.
I picked 100 yrs, but 110, or 125yrs it still wasn't that long ago.
It's just that modernity has accelerated so fast that it seems like we have lived the way we do now for much longer.
I've rented and lived in several houses that still had a working hand pump outside the back door.
One place i lived, still had a wood and coal powered aga and one kitchen cold water tap indoors.
Water was heated in big kettles and tin buckets on the aga for a tin bath in front of the aga. So cosy! Lot of work tho.
We didnt use the washing copper but took clothes etc to the laundrette, simply because we didnt have the time to handwash more than our undies and socks!
We had a whole larder room with dirt floor for clamps of home grown veg and hooks in the ceiling for hams etc.
That was in the early/mid 1980s.
We had no electricity upstairs, so needed candles to go to bed.
I loved that house. I loved the lifestyle. I'd love to go back to that house now, it was so resiliant to things we could be facing now, but it got sold and modernised.
Oh well that's progress. Sometimes I feel progress is a headlong rush towards towards the end. We just keep going faster and faster, adding this and that to improve life, and make it easier to work more and more to make more money to buy more stuff to enable us to "save time" so we can work harder for more stuff........and so on.
So then we need to take time out in the woods ,or holidays to reboot our frazzled souls.
We are too busy or tired to see what life has become.
Yes, I was busy and worked hard at that old house, but it was good work that actualy kept body..and soul together rather than relying on an electrical gadget to do the job.
But then, I'm a self confessed luddite. I think I was born with a love of the old ways, and find modern life a strange way to live.
Anyway, that's way off topic, but it did start with water!!!

Ps, at the time, I worked mornings on an arable farm, (6am start), afternoons collecting copy from garages for car sales for the local rag, one eve a week, sat and sun mornings teaching star rider motorcycle training, and a couple of evenings washing up at a local restaurant. It was a busy life, so not the dreamy rural restful life one might imagine. I'd still go back to it all like a shot.