The Weather and Water

Greetings all, Ken here.  I've been watching the weather all winter or rather, our extended fall and on into the spring and wondering what the rest of the year has in store for us. I have a feeling that this will be a dry spring and summer.

What does that mean for us? It means taking very good care of the water we have on hand in cisterns and water barrels and collecting every bit of water we can, trying to keep the evaporation down and being good stewards of the aforementioned water.

This is, in fact, another facet of the experiment we are engaged in and I'm brimming with ideas to try for the collection of water, storage and distribution of any water we use using only the technology which was available in Upper Canada in 1865.

My research and experience shows cisterns, water barrels, watering cans, pipes, wind and water driven pumps as well as hand pumps were the level of technology available in rural Upper Canada at this time.

Water barrels were made of wood, cisterns of lime cement (all that was available at the time) pipes of wood and some metal, pumps of wood and cast iron and hoses of rubberized cloth (much like a primitive fire hose) were the means of collecting, storing and distributing water. Eavestroughing was made of wood, usually with a downspout leading to a barrel or cistern, also made of wood.

I have constructed an eavestrough of wood and made a downspout to direct the water to a barrel. I can honestly say the wooden eavestrough works quite well. It seals up during the rain and is at last as efficient in gathering the runoff from the roof as metal eavestrough. This test of wooden eavestrough is in place on the chicken coop. The downspout on the other hand, leaves a bit to be desired. If it's windy, the water has a tendency to miss the barrel and is lost to our use. I have a better design in mind and will let you know how well it works.

I also have to adjust the eavetroughing on the main house to get better usage of the water runoff from the roof. We have several barrels to collect the runoff as well as the cisterns, one on the north side and a second one on the south side. They are usually full all year so this year will be a test for them as well I think.

All in all, water and it's usage is yet another aspect of our experiment, and I hope to have some numbers (Imperial gallons used, where it was used and how it was collected) for posting at the end of the year. It will form a baseline for comparison to future years.

That's all for now, thanks.
Ken amd Margaret