Or you could use 2 empty 5 gallon pails flipped over with 1 foot 2X4’s set on to give the necessary 14 1/2" clearance instead of the concrete blocks. I see now where that will lose you 1 jug underneath but no worse than cinder block. Milk crates would hold up also. If you are doing this, the wood replacement every few years should be ok. the legs shouldn’t bow away.
Why are you filling the tank to flush? A bucket directly into the bowl should be all you need.
I’m going to assume you’re on a well since it’s water you’re worried about. A $200 camp generator would provide MORE than enough power to run your well pump and then you just need to store the generator and a couple of 5 gal gas cans. At half load, you get 6+ hrs of run time per tank of gas (.5 gal) and have 10 cycles in each can (assuming constant run which shouldn’t be necessary). And you have the benefit that you can charge cell phones, etc.
But hell, I live in the South and specifically Florida, for us hurricanes aren’t a once in decade event and shit NEVER freezes in my garage. So I could be off base completely.
FYI, that was literally the first link I found, shopping around, off-season sale, you might (probably) could do better.
Why not use five-gallon pails filled with water? That gives you ten more gallons of stored water.
I get what you are trying for. The blocks could be plenty stable but they will use up a lot of space. You could knock together some lumber pretty easily to do this. The lumber would make fine legs and reinforce the platform so you don’t have to worry about sagging. There are plenty of other options, including some heavy enough shelving to hold the water and a couple of more storage shelves above that. But you can find a lot of ways to get this done.
The technical term for the sagging behavior is creep. For wood based products like particle board, the dominant factor at play is humidity levels and humidity changes.
“ The studies revealed that changing relative humidity above 65% results in higher creep deformation. However, an even greater effect was found if the relative humidity was cycled between two levels. It was observed that for moisture resistant particleboard, increasing the humidity from 30% to 90% caused an increase in deflection of four times, but that cycling the humidity between these two levels, caused a larger increase of over ten times after 20 weeks”
I would recommend a plastic Rectangular tank that sits on a concrete block base. You can install a tap at the bottom to get the water as and when you need. Tanks come in various shapes and sizes and you may find what you need at a RV store or the internet.
Here is one for example : 12 Gallon Rectangle Poly Tank R-RB124 | Plastic-Mart
Way more efficient with space for sure, but if I’m understanding this correctly, this sounds like more work. The idea would be to just have 2 of my 2.5 gallon jugs total, both empty, plus a couple/few of those 12 gallon tanks. Then when I want to flush a toilet, I would fill my empty jugs with the tank and then use the jugs to flush the toilet?
That adds an extra step of manual labor during the next power outage, which is exactly the work load I’m trying to minimize. I prefer to do the work filling the jugs ahead of time, then when emergency strikes they’re already ready to go.
I can’t even picture this. Could you explain it in more detail, or maybe there’s a video somewhere I can look at?
You just dump the bucket directly into the toilet bowl.
You might need to pour a quarter or so of a bucket to refill the bowl to normal levels after it empties.
Typing “how big of a generator do you need to run a well pump” into google returns the following google answer:
Further research shows that we have two pumps, as this sentence describes our setup perfectly: “Often a well pump is used to pump water into a storage tank and then a booster pump is used to pump water from the storage tank and pressurize it for irrigation and household needs.” I can confirm from this most recent power outage that our tank only holds around 10 gallons. We got two accidental flushes, then the third accidental flush finished off the tank. (No more sink for hand washing and teeth brushing. Doh!)
So I would definitely need a generator big enough to handle two pumps, and it sounds like turning them both on would require a sizable generator. Would you say your personal experience contradicts what google is telling me?
That last bit about the cell phone charging is a good point. Fortunately for us it turned out to be moot in this most recent emergency. Before the phones even got low I found myself running all over town buying water, so I just charged them up while driving. We ended that power outage at like 95% charge.
heh, no, I understand the words you are saying. What I can’t picture is how that would flush anything that floats, like tissue paper. Are you saying if I put, say, 4 tissues in a toilet right now, filled up a mop bucket and dumped the bucket into the bowl directly, there would no longer be 4 tissues in the bowl, they’d be flushed down?
If someone said that to me in person I would immediately bet them $1 it wouldn’t work and then grab a mop bucket and try it to see.
Try it! That’s how toilets flush. Once the water in the bowl, from whatever source, is higher than the siphon bend it automatically flows out of the bowl. if there’s enough water going over the siphon bend a, wait for it, siphon forms and empties the bowl.
It doesn’t matter if the water is coming from the tank or from a bucket you dump into the bowl, what matters is the level of water in the bowl.
You might have experienced this when flushing doesn’t ‘work’. The bowl just fills with water and then suddenly empties completely.
I have experienced that. Way cool! I learned my something new for the day and it’s not even 7am yet. I like it.
The actual answer to your original question is then “Because it never occurred to me that that would work.” But assuming it does and I now know it does, in practice that sounds like one of the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
The only reason I’m manually flushing a toilet is because that toilet needs to be flushed. Either it’s brown and needs to be flushed down, or it’s been mellowing yellow for so long that it utterly reeks. Given these are pretty much the only reasons I would be flushing the toilet, it seems self-evident to me that keeping the lid closed and filling the odorless tank would be infinitely preferable to pouring gallons of water directly into giant stinking piles of grossness that I also now have to at least glance at to aim the water in the first place.
Everything about that sounds maximum awful, so I guess that’s the reason I’m filling the tank instead of the bowl directly.
And the local weather station just mentioned tornados for this afternoon. Yikes. One of the advantages of living in New England is not having to worry about tornados, but I guess Laura is going nuts in Louisiana so maybe it’s a side effect of that.
So I guess it’s time to fill 4 more of my fancy new jugs (I have 12 onhand, 8 filled with water 4 empty) plus the bathtub. Oofa.
Yes, it is usually repetitive movement that causes molecular fatigue. The OP’s load is stable and stationary. It is also well under the maximum limit stated.
Huh. I guess my experience is different or my father-in-law has a little tiny pump at the mountain house. I’ll ask him. Yeah a 5k+ generator is going to be more in the $400-$600 range (more if you want dual fuel).
You could also probably get away with just switching back-and-forth. Run the main and fill the tank. Cut the main and run the booster during use. When tank gets low, cut the booster and run the main to refill. Run a couple of switches from the pump house to the main house and it’s less work than schlepping water back and forth to the toilet.
Good luck with the tornados. Fingers crossed for you!
To clarify, my town gets power outages probably every year at least. But typically it’s back on in a matter of hours or by the next day. I don’t even notice those because of the 4 extra flushes kept onhand in the 16 tea jugs, plus each toilet tank starts the power outage full so that’s a free flush each and another 2.5 flushes worth in the tank. So if I lose power for a day or less it’s a minor inconvenience at worst.
I’m now trying to up my game so that I can weather a 5 day outage without noticing. Longer than that and I can go out and buy more water at stores. But for the first several days, even if I don’t have enough notice (or I forget) to fill the bathtub, I think storing 10 extra flushes onhand is a much better number than 4.
1 I agree with the sweat and humidity will eventually warp the particle board. Do you have water accessible, even by car, such as a nearby accessible stream (not that you have to buy wanter to flush down the toilet), thus you can store empty containers and only fill them when needed? Perhaps only storing 1 container full? Another option if you suspect you are going to be without water is get a plastic sheet and line the bathtub and fill it up (plastic sheet is because the drain may not totally seal, which is fine for baths, not fine for water storage.). Though I now see you mentioned the bathtub.
2 Many well systems are single pumps, not 2. Some take lots of power, others not so much. Your circuit breaker panel would give you an idea, as you should find your water pump breaker, and on that breaker the amperage it’s rated to. That would be the max, the pump would most likely use less, though startup surge may exceed that for a short time. To get watts, multiply that number by 240 if it’s a double breaker, 120 if single. To get more accurate you could get the current measured with a clamp on ammeter. But in general you are looking at a $500-$600 generator as stated above. You can expect to spend more for the electrical hookup and that can get pricy depending on how you want to do it. Dual fuel and only using propane will help ensure it starts when you need it.
Probably too late but two cinder blocks and a 2"x10" or 2"x12" plank will be far stronger and far cheaper. Lowes or Home Depot will cut the plank to the length you want for you.
I did consider it, but the jugs ended up being 14.5" tall. I didn’t love the idea of a stack of cinder blocks a foot and a half tall as the legs for a structure intended to hold 100+ pounds. I also worried that a 3- or 4-foot long piece of wood would bow. (6 jugs across is almost exactly 40 inches.) I’m hoping the steel frame on the benches I ordered renders the weakness of the particle board immaterial.