My biggest concerns for the next 20 years are widespread droughts and utility grid disruptions. Our utility grid sucks and SCADA systems are easily hackable by bad actors. I'd like to put resources into ensuring an uninterrupted water supply. So I'm thinking about a move to a rural area that gives me more flexibility than being in a city, reliant on a city utility, with at best twenty thousand gallons in a swimming pool as my backup.
I don't know much about water wells but have done a little research and here's stuff I couldn't find because the internet isn't devoted to lunatic preppers who are worried about water shortages.
1. Does anyone living rurally combine water methods, maybe having a well but also getting water trucked in, and also collecting rain water? Any other water methods I haven't considered?
2. Does the well have X amount of water, or X amount of time? Suppose I get a well dug, could I prolong the life of it by having water trucked in during good times, to save the well for hard times, like if trucked water gets very expensive or if the trucks stop rolling? Or is the well going to last X years regardless of how much you use it, because other people are tapped into the same spring, or just over time the spring dies up naturally?
3. If you're a "prepper" and are connected to city water, can you get a well dug anyway, as a secondary water source? Or do most cities make it illegal because they hate competition?
4. Can you have a backup secondary well dug at the same time as the primary well? I read wells don't last forever, and the middle of a disaster is not the time I want to try to find a pro to dig me a new well. But I don't know if digging the second well might simply tap the same underground "spring" so really provide no benefit at all.
5. Can you pre-buy tools to dig your own well, should the first fail and you can't get a pro out? I saw some website of a guy with a homemade well drill made from PVC pipe but I don't know how useful that would be. And if the tools are $100k+ then I don't think I can afford them.
6. Can wells only be dug in the non-winter months? Suppose you're in the Dakotas and the weather is freezing half of the year. Does that make it a lot harder or even impossible maybe to get the well dug during half the year? If so, what's the work around plan if you need a new well dug during that time?
7. Any considerations for recycling "gray" water? Which I think means, non-poop toilet waste water? Maybe not setting things up to do this 24/7, but installing a little extra plumbing to allow the capability, should a massive black swan disruption occur and pre-installing a few hundred dollars of plumbing before you need it, beats scooping it out of the toilet by hand in a terrible crisis.
8. How about a man-made pond that holds 10k to 50k gallons to serve as a backup water system? And raise some fish or something edible in there, too?
I'm envisioning a rural house with 5 to 20 acres, two wells dug, each to different depths and far apart, some kind of rainfall collection system, some kind of snow melting system, and a very large water reservoir, I don't know, maybe 50k gallons, if that's not too insane? Like the size of two inground pools. And I might have water trucked in every few weeks or month to refill my reservoir without tapping the wells.
Also a series of water purification devices, possibly a couple swimming pool sand filters, finished with a swimming pool DE filter, so that the water can be cleaned really well. Maybe a reverse osmosis system at the house itself, too. And plumbing that connects everything together, so the rainwater can combine with the well water and trucked-in water. Some kind of pressurized tank so I can use water in the house with good pressure.
Strategically design the plumbing so that repairs are easy to make. Lots of valves to block an area that's leaking to make it easier to replace a section of pipe. Good clearance on the plumbing. I spent a summer in college installing plumbing for inground pools so have a small bit of experience there. I guess I'd have to install the plumbing below the frost line to avoid the pipes freezing which might be deep in a place like Montana, and that might make "easily repairable" be impossible, unless there's some special tricks?
If your primary concern was water shortages, and had a reasonable budget, but weren't Zuckerberg or Bezos rich, what kind of setup might you do for a family of 6 split across two small houses on a rural plot of land, specific location undetermined at this time?
I guess I have to think about septic systems next, but probably a totally different thread, unless there's any specific considerations related to potable water and sepctic systems, such as if your septic overflows or breaks, maybe it can seep into and contaminate your drinkable water if you didn't plan the locations of these properly?