Last winter there was three feet of icy snow on the ground for the better part of three months, and I hauled every drop of water I used by hand. No truck was getting up here. Five-gallon jugs in a wheelbarrow, 2 at a time, across the ice from the neighbors well, every couple of days. It was miserable, and it’s the whole reason this project exists. The goal was never fancy. It was: don’t do that again.
So this fall I’m building a real water storage system against the wall of the tiny house — enough buffer that if I get snowed in for ten days, I just don’t think about water.
What it actually is
Two upright food-grade drums, side by side, in an insulated box I can heat through the cold. Fill them from a tank in the truck with a pump; draw from them through a filter to the sink. That’s it. A composting toilet means the sink is the only fixture on the system, so I don’t need much — careful, I use somewhere around 35–40 gallons a week. Two drums is weeks of runway, and I top off small and often instead of hauling a month’s water at once.
The boring part — which is most of the work — was the plumbing. Two separate flows that people get backwards: you filter on the way OUT, at the tap, not on the way IN. If you filter going into storage you strip the chlorine that keeps the stored water clean while it sits. So the fill side just moves water and doses chlorine into the drums, and the filter lives on the draw side where you actually pour a glass.
The part that took three days
I wanted to do this cheap, with used food-grade barrels. I spent the better part of a week chasing that. The used-barrel market is real, but it lives behind barns and sugarhouses, not online — and none of the local leads panned out in the window I had. Sold out, gated behind memberships, phantom listings, a drive too far. At some point you have to admit the deal is costing you more than it saves — in time, in a bad back, in a car that was down for a steering repair in the middle of it — and just buy the new thing and move on. That’s not giving up. That’s arithmetic. Two new drums, done, both in hand this week.
Winter is the actual design problem
Keeping water liquid in an unheated box on a Massachusetts mountaintop is the whole game. The trick is that you’re not trying to keep it warm — just above freezing, and only on the worst nights. A big mass of water, 2 65 gallon drums, has enormous thermal inertia; it rides out a cold night barely losing a degree. The danger isn’t a cold night, it’s a cold week that slowly wins. So the design is insulation first, heat second: a thick foam box does most of the work for free, and a small heater on a dumb thermostat just tops up the deficit when it’s brutal.
The thing that freezes first is never the water — it’s the plumbing. The quarter-inch of water sitting in a valve freezes hours before the drums do. So every fitting lives inside the warm box, and the real insurance is being able to drain the whole thing empty in about a minute. Empty pipe can’t burst. That one design choice matters more than any fitting I could buy.
Where it’s at
Designed, sourced, scheduled. Platform this weekend — pressure-treated frame, foam, a plywood deck to spread the load so a full drum doesn’t crush the insulation — then set the drums, cut and plumb, test everything wet before I close up the box. I’ll post how it goes, including whatever I got wrong the first time, because something always is.
(Photos to come once it’s built — I’ll add them.)