Hi everyone,
I would really appreciate some advice on the best way to provide water for our land.
We need enough for 20ish sheep, a few weaners, a house cow and calf, chickens, and loads of veggies, fruit bushes and 2 huge polytunnels. (We have barely any of this yet but that's the long term plan).
Option 1: connection to the mains. cost £2k plus metered billing. Our least favourite option as we wanted to have our own supply with no ongoing bills.
Option 2: a borehole. The water dowser man has found water in one of the fields. We'd need a borehole 140ft deep and we would want to add a special hand pump that we've seen in the US (as we have no electric at the moment) to get the water pumped to the surface. Pump costs £1k. I've been getting quotes for the borehole and they range from £4.5k to nearly £10k! No idea why the prices are so different as they both seem to include the same things in the quote.
Option 3:
?? We'd really love a borehole but its just so expensive I don't think we can do it. Does anyone have any other ideas? We are building a pole barn so I was wondering if we could collect rainwater and store it in tanks(?) ready for use for the animals and to water the veggies in very dry weather? Obviously won't work right now as it hasn't rained for ages but if we get the barn ready for autumn and collect rain all winter would there be enough for our needs next spring when we start getting the animals? There are also two very small streams on the land as well that normally provided water for the sheep that the last people had there, but they dried up last month - much earlier than usual apparently.
We don't live on our land so can bring water from home if we needed to as well.
If anyone has any ideas to stop me stressing about this that'd be great! Thanks.