Recycling water from basement

I live in an older house out in the country. The basement, if you can call it that, is a small room with large rocks as walls and kind of a cement or hard floor. It is always damp and there is a hole in the ground where water accumulates and a sump pump is used.

In the past, the sump pump failed and the basement area filled with water, up to the waist. But in recent years, farmers in the area have installed thousands of feet of plastic coil in their fields to reduce the accumulation of standing water. This has had an affect on the water accumulation in the basement and for about 2-3 years, the sump pump rarely pumps out water.

This year, there is standing in water around the hose in areas never seen before. The sump pump is working fine, and often. I'm wondering if instead of pumping the water out into a drainage area (very small area btw) away from the house, why couldn't the water be used within the house. If not for drinking, at least for the toilet - but that seems to be a lot of work for a small return.

In a survival situation where electricity might not be readily available it seems the water could be harvested with either a solar pump or manual removal and used for drinking if properly filtered and sterilized??? Maybe distilled? BUT, the septic is only about 20ish feet away from the back side of the house. It is a newer mound system.

Mostly thinking out loud here as I am going to move the drainage area out a bit more in a few weeks while the ground is still soft. I am thinking of creating a system where I could use the water if need be. BTW, the water is clean and clear looking and never smells bad although I know those are not the only indications of it being potable or not.

Thoughts?

Here is a very rudimentary sketch

Working in water treatment, I would stay away from water would almost surely be the product of septic run off. That said it’s still possible to treat and make safe most water sources.

With ground water usually you don’t have as many fecal coliform present and the water is general lower turbidity( amount of suspended dirt) but could be higher in things like VOC ( volatile organic compounds) which can be/are bad and hard to remove and treat.

One could treat this water in the event of emergency if you stained it through a sand and charcole filter, boil it then treat it with a small amount of bleach like a 1/4-1/2 tea spoon of pure bleach 7% into a 5 gallon pale of water to bring it to around 2.0mg/l which is the desired chlorine content for tap water leaving a water plant. This allows the water to stay safe when contaminated later by bacteria. The water will keep safe for a few days this way or can be stored in a barrel longer term.

I would however seek a better water source but in a absolute emergency this would keep you from getting thirty anyway.

a reply to: StoutBroux

a reply to: Athetos

Thanks for an excellent response, pretty much what I was thinking. I have a super cool very large microscope and will do some investigating of the current water quality, just for the heck of it when I have time.

a reply to: StoutBroux

What you're talking about is usually called brown water, and to be honest with the amount of reprocessing that it's going to need to be fit to use even for flushing the toilet it's not really worth the money. Even processing out the solids that could clog a pipe isn't really worth it. You're better off pumping it out and using it to irrigate your land than using it in internal pipes.

If you're not in an active fallout situation, rainwater reprocessing is the way to go if you want to save water. It takes much simpler equipment as you don't need to deal with things like sediment or ground bacteria.

Drive a point into the basement and use that water for watering the garden and possibly doing laundry and toilet and stuff. It will lower the water level there. that will keep it from coming in the basement.

You will probably need a point, some well pipe, and a shallow well pump with a tank. It used to cost around four hundred bucks plus, you would need to put in some copper pipes to seperate the toilet and laundry water and of course hook up the outside faucet.

One benefit of this would be that you would not be totally waterless if your water went out...but a shallow well's water would need to be tested if you wanted to drink it. If you drive the point too deep, it will also not lower the groundwater there if you go through the clay layer or through whatever is keeping the water from going down into the earth deeper.


You can sometimes dig a hole outside so rain drains past the clay layer and it helps to keep the whole area dry....they use that kind of technique in fields sometimes to lower water saturation. When doing that, contamination can get down into the well area though from the soils above if there was lots of pesticides used over the years. You don't want to screw up your well water that way either, placement of that has to be done carefully if the area was used for commercial farming over the years.

a reply to: StoutBroux

I had a basent like that at Nana's house growing, but we were in a city and it looked like used motor oil. I ran the lab at our county health department and inspected water systems.

Most labs will send you a bottle to collect a sample fairly affordably, but your local health department may also have a lab or be able to direct you to one. If you run a test every year or so you'll be able to find out if changes have occurred.

You can have them do a library panel on it. Depending on where you live and prior use of the property there could be unacceptable levels of arsenic or lead (since you said rural, but there are others). Things like apple orchards historically used arsenic. Certified labs will give you the level detected, detection limit, and the maximum contaminant level from the EPA.

I don't think VOCs aren't typically high unless you've got some contaminant source nearby, it's a significant factor around landfills.

Being near septic obviously you should test for bacteria, E.coli. If it's been standing for a while and test clean when you take the test it's not a guarantee of future cleanliness, but an indicator. The other issue with being near septic is nitrates. Nitrates are really only a problem for those under 18 months, I believe but may be 6 months up or down, and those with certain conditions. It causes blue baby or methemoglobinemia. There's no simple way to get rid of nitrates and any inorganic contaminants are concentrated by boiling (except volitiles, not sure if it gasses off during boiling but would assume so).

Athetos gave great disinfection advice. I can't think of any reason to boil and do chlorine since you said the water is clear. If it was cloudy bleach would oxidate some of the organics. Otherwise just a normal boiling disinfection is fine if your tests show no contaminants prior. A rolling boil at a minute is the EPA standard for emergency water disinfection and the first choice, cryptosporidium can survive in bleach at very high levels for quite some time. 2.0ppm would allow cryptosporidium to survive for quite some time, I'm not even sure how long.

Bleach does keep a residual disinfection. If you're going to hold in larger containers after boiling a small amount of chlorine, even as low as .3-5, could be applied to hold it. Note that sunlight causes chrlorine to burn off, so if it's going to be exposed to sunlight it won't persist as long.