Replies

1. 
   OnkelUdo | Feb 17, 2010 01:06am | #1

   What part of the country are you in?  Was the house at one point very isolated?

   One old house I worked on had a galvinzed cistern in the attic that had obvioulsy been place there before the majority of the roof structure was completed.  This was the first house (1912) in the neighborhood and of course was served by a well.  Althought the house was wired for electricity it also had a gas valve in every room (irrelevant...sort of).  One of the older residents of the neighborhood indicated that the cistern was used for natural water pressure because the electricity was so sporadic that they would pump water up to the cistern when they had electricity so they would have days of pressurized water without having to resort to the manual rotary pump.

   In some parts of rural Oklahoma, the wind turbines that were used to fill livestock watering troughs were often adapted for the this purpose and you would see them almost attached to house.  Even thought it seemed like the wind was always blowing, there obviously were a lot times were they probably did not have enought  wind to pump 12 feet of head in addition to well depth.

   Onkel Udo

2. 
   junkhound | Feb 17, 2010 04:24am | #2

   Thanks for the post.

   Have seen 500 gal tanks in the attic, but never anything like you describe; heck, I have a 100 gal tank on the 2nd floor of my remote cabin to use for water supply as run on a genset or battery power there.  

   Interesting to note what others have done in the past.

3. 
   Piffin | Mar 08, 2010 03:27pm | #3

   Yes, have seen a number of those, taken a few out.

   They genrally do no get filled tot he brim though. Think of a warter tank for the toilet. It has an overflow stem and fill valve.

   It was to provide constant water pressure. A lot of municipoalities have about the same setup in their water towers.

   Around here, the pumps were powered by the old Fairbanks one lunger deisle motors. They could cough up a lot of noise and quite a stench. It got stated and run once or twice a day to fill the attic cistern, then shut off again. Gravity took care of supplying the house plumbing

4. 
   DanH | Mar 08, 2010 09:20pm | #4

   Poor man's "water tower",

   Poor man's "water tower", back before they had pressure tanks -- not at all unusual.  A windmill or other pump would pump the water up into that tank and then it could flow down and feed the house.

5. 
   SteveInCleveland | Mar 16, 2010 04:04pm | #5

   Please share some photos!

6. 
   shelternerd | Apr 18, 2010 04:54pm | #6

   Sounds like a low flow pump

   We did something like this for an off grid house w/ a direct drive solar well pump. when the sun shone a dedicated PV cell ran a super low flow pump directly to a 300 gallon tank up under the ridge beam. when it over flowed it was into the drip irrigation system in the garden. The pump was similar to a little hydraulic pump and was plumbed w/ 1 1/2" pvc from the bottom of the well all the way to the tank. My job picked up there to get the water from the tank into the house. Nice system worked sweet.

   Another situation that worked similar was in the mountians of NC with a ram pump that just pumped 24/7 off a spring, sounded like the mountain had a heartbeat when you walked by it in the pasture.

   My families place up in maine jsut had a couple sections of 4" concrete pipe buried in the hill above the house and ran gravity only down to two houses. Get many folks drawing water at the same time and you had issues, a high cistern would have been nice but eventually we just put in a pressure pump on a low cistern, easier to protect from freezing in the basement than in the attic. .