Monday, August 11, 2008

Where You At? (Part 2)

This is part of a series answering questions from the "Where You At" quiz published in CoEvolution Quarterly. The version we are using was revised by Kevin Kelly, and is available as a .pdf here or on his original site here.

3.) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
Rain falls into the many lakes and rivers and percolates down through the earth. We sit atop the Chain of Lakes Watershed, which is a piece of the larger Grand Traverse Watershed. Our well taps into this water at 260 feet. On the ISLAND property, that's the end of it. By the end of the season, we will have a solar powered pump that will suck water into a cistern when the sun is out, where it is stored until use.

4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
The ISLAND property does not yet have a flusher, but at the Kik home, we have a septic system. Everything is flushed into a tank, with an overflow into an underground field of rocks and blocks that purifies the water and deposits it clean back into the ground.

Next post:
5) How many feet above sea level are you?
6) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?

1 comment:

Lindy said...

Good questions. I knew more than I thought I would know but not as much as I should know.

You're very fortunate to tap into water at 260'. Here in the desert where the water table used to be so high people could not put in basements or swimming pools it is now down to about 800'. :(

As for flushing - we will go the route of Joseph Jenkins and "The Humanure Handbook" ASAP. However, while we are still here in the desert solids go into the septic and liquids are turned into "Liquid Gold" :)

Lindy - boiling in the Sonoran Desert