Getting new well tanks - anything I should add?

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Nice work! I’ve enjoyed seeing the progress with your system. Are you concerned about erosion on the hillside (along road perhaps)? I’m not very familiar with the climate in your area.
 
Nice work! I’ve enjoyed seeing the progress with your system. Are you concerned about erosion on the hillside (along road perhaps)? I’m not very familiar with the climate in your area.

Thanks! I'm glad I decided to handle it instead of farming it out to the well guys. I'm not concerned about erosion. The pad is set into a rocky knoll on the hill and should be stable for a long time, and the road is really just a five foot wide one that will never see any vehicle traffic. It's so steep that it's tricky to walk up or down it without your feet slipping out from under you. The climate here can range from 15 to 50 inches of rain in a year. The ground is loamy from oak leaves falling on it for a million years, but about a foot down it's clay with some rocks.

Here's a pic showing the output from one of the tanks with a hose spigot at the ready. The vertical is the fill pipe from the well.

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Here's the main supply coming from the hill (from the right in the photo), and splitting off to the two houses. You still see some dog leg pipes still attached to the old steel tank. I'll clean that up. On the upper right you can see the 1" electrical conduit for the float switch and 1" fill pipe from the well.

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No pressure pumps! Woohoo!

wish I could say the same. Nope. 3. Occasionally problematic. Sometimes a nightmare.

I bet you're happy with that! Congrats! That will last a long, long time.

ps, since you have power there, if you're concerned with freezing a valve, you could use a "heat tape" and some insulation to virtually eliminate that possibility. I agree with the ball valve vs gate valve frost resistance comment.

you may have no idea what I'm talking about, but it's a common application for heat tape.

yup, you could use some pipe insulation and heat tape, or a heated box to enclose all the valves and above ground pipes.

or not
 
No pressure pumps! Woohoo!

wish I could say the same. Nope. 3. Occasionally problematic. Sometimes a nightmare.

I bet you're happy with that! Congrats! That will last a long, long time.

ps, since you have power there, if you're concerned with freezing a valve, you could use a "heat tape" and some insulation to virtually eliminate that possibility. I agree with the ball valve vs gate valve frost resistance comment.

you may have no idea what I'm talking about, but it's a common application for heat tape.

yup, you could use some pipe insulation and heat tape, or a heated box to enclose all the valves and above ground pipes.

or not

Thanks! I'm very happy not hearing the pressure pump kicking on and off. Plus it's now a simpler system and I've opened up a nice slot on the breaker panel.

I'm not too concerned with the temps. The worst case I think I'll see is low 20's F, and that would be once every ten years. It's much more likely the temp will drop to 27 F for a few hours, a few times each winter. The piping at the tanks is not a concern since the water tanks themselves are a pretty large thermal reservoir. The only real concern is at the manifold and it'll be wrapped with insulation. On those cold nights I usually get paranoid and crack open a hose to get some flow. But, it's CA at only 700 feet of elevation, so I'm not too worried.
 
Some further improvements including burying the pipe underground the rest of the way including under the retaining wall, and adding a poor man's fire hydrant in the form of a 2" ball valve. Watering the yard with a golf course hose is pretty awesome. Also putting in a paver patio and steps along with a small lawn. Archer assures me he's going to promptly destroy the lawn.

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Looking at buying the property next door at auction. Guy hasn't paid his property taxes in years. Surprise! There's a well there.

There's actually some galvanized lines up above the well area on a flat spot where it was "developed" at one time. Looks like Unc's crew made it out west at some point. It's some "majestic" work for sure!

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"Well," the auction for the vacant 4 acre property next to mine is set for Jan 14 and I'm guessing the deteriorating economy and rising interest rates bode "well" for a lower winning bid. If anyone is interested, here's the link to the County Fire requirements for water storage in the Wildland Urban Interface Fire Area of Santa Clara County. https://stgenpln.blob.core.windows.net/document/FMO_NoPurveyor_Brochure.pdf

Since the property is only 150 feet wide, it's highly likely any future house will be within 50 feet of a property line, so going to ensure I'm covering the numbers plus the 50% add per the above link. I think 20k gallons on the hill at the new site is what I'll do, provided I get the property. I'd place four 5k tanks on a pad, again waaaaay up the hill haha.

Looks like 4" pipe, and likely PVC is ok. Still maybe $3/ft for the main 4" pipe down. I'll probably suck it up and go schedule 80 again. I think inch or inch and a quarter will be fine for the feed line going up. Total materials cost for the project will likely be in the $20k range, but should add that amount to the property value. I'll have the requisite wharf hydrant down at the bottom, along with a 2" spigot of some type, as well as probably one or two more spigots along the route up the hill for use in a fire, or irrigation of some landscaping.

I'm still not sure at all what if any 120 or 240 volt wiring I'll run up the hill, and how far. That will most likely be a game time decision once I own the property and have my buddy with the bobcat with tracks carve the road up, the path for the piping down, and the flat areas for the tanks and maybe a "vista point" somewhere.

I'm getting excited. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.
 
Here's a very crude top view of my place labeled 1, and the property next door labeled 2.

Elevation increases as you move up and to the left in the picture. The new tanks will be higher than my existing tanks

The two light blue circle-ish marks are my current water tanks I put on the hill. The four circle-ish marks on parcel 2 is approx where I'd put the new tanks. The yellow line marks the approx path of the pipe I'll put in between to periodically replenish my house's tanks. Finally, the purple line is about where the piping would go up from the well and back down near the street.

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I'd want to make sure that they have not changed that document before you do the work to meet it. They are changing a lot of them and lately they often take down the old ones before the update is ready. Also I keep finding specs for the same thing that have different values in different documents. It's maddening. You pretty much have to ask the planning dept what the real value is, and that can depend on who is answering the question.

If you get permits for the road and tank pad be prepared for a big expense and a long wait.

I'm three years into trying to get a permit to build a shop and I don't even have the drainage permit yet. Admittedly some of that delay was due to covid and me not pushing the architect and geologist but most of it is due to the county. It can take 2 months to get a reply and of course it's a rejection. The requirements keep changing. The things they want me to do for drainage are insane, like a 20x20x3 retention pond. If I could talk my wife into it I'd have left already. I love a lot of things about California but this is stupid.

If you do it without permits that may be a problem for the eventual buyers. And hopefully you're on good terms with all your neighbors. If one of them rats you out you're ****ed. There's a place not far from me who's been tagged with a stop work order for three years because they were moving (signifcant amounts of) dirt without an excavation permit.
 
Good points. I'm on great terms with the neighbors, so should be ok there. The "road" will just be a cleared brush path, not wide enough for a truck- I don't think. Just big enough to use to carry the water tanks up there with the Bobcat.

I hope the shop finally comes to fruition. At some point I'm going to buy a place that already has a shop. It's a nightmare to get one built these days.
 
My next door neighbors got their "welcome to country living" moment last night. I heard some water rushing, like a fast moving creek or something about 9pm. When I investigated with a flashlight I could see multiple streams of water as big around as my thigh emerging from the neighbors property near their driveway. I hustled over to let them know and by the time I got to their door and had them come out to see, all 15,000 gallons had drained out and was in the drainage ditch and street. I think they have a 4-6" pipe that comes down the hill from their elevated tanks to a couple fire hydrants in front of the house at about 40 PSI. That pipe must have burst just under their paver driveway as that is where most of the water was coming out. They paid $3M for the place last June and they're now in the 3rd world this morning with no running water. Sigh, welcome to the country.
 
Was that a result of storm damage from this winter? This was a rough winter, worst in the 25 years I have lived here. I'm still cleaning up the down trees and branches on my land.

We've had the pipe from the gravity feed 10k gallon tank break when someone backed into the hydrant, but we were there to run up to the tank to the shutoff valve.

Two sets of my new neighbors ran out of propane during one of our power outages a few months ago because they let their whole house generators run all day and night. A big fir fell across their driveways during one of the storms. Some of us locals got one driveway cleared but the other was too big and sketchy for any of us to deal with and that family had already escaped to a relative's house in the valley so it wasn't an emergency. They ended up hiring a tree service.
 
I really don't know what caused it. I don't think it was the storm, but hard to tell. It appears as though it broke under the paver driveway. More damage was done when that water column came shooting down the hill, pulling a vacuum on one of the tanks.

I escaped damage here somehow, but I am protected somewhat from the wind. I think I still had about 60 MPH gusts. It sure cleared all the dead material from the trees. I had one branch about six feet long break off and come down, that's it for damage. I was very lucky. I have friends up the road on Twin Falls and Loma Chiquita suffer damage from falling trees though.

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Wow that's the first time I have seen tanks collapse.

We got 7" of heavy wet snow. It's unusual to get significant snow here, so the trees are not adapted for it. The weight broke a lot of trees. Many of the live oaks broke in half. The others that had leaves or needles lost many branches. Some came down entirely.

I'm getting a lot of use out of the forestry winch and I'm going to end up with a couple year's worth of firewood.
 
If you have uncontrolled water release from those tanks they could collapse because of vacuum build up from loss of water. System should have a vacuum break on the tanks. If it was mentioned before excuse me.
 
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