Homestead Hydro

Kate Winslow

Writing at Homestead Hydro from a five-acre property in rural Oregon

About

Three years ago I was renting an apartment in Portland. My partner and I bought five acres in the Douglas County foothills of southwestern Oregon in 2022, and we brought two dogs, a lot of enthusiasm, and almost no idea what running a rural property actually involves on the water side.

Year one taught us the expensive way. In July we ran the well dry: didn't know about recovery rate yet, pulled water faster than the well could refill, and the pump started sucking air. Two days hauling water in borrowed jugs while the dogs watched us like we'd personally betrayed them. The pressure tank got replaced that October. Somewhere in between we found out the creek looked clean and wasn't. Coliform, caught only because I was curious enough to test it.

Winter finished the lesson. A pipe burst during the first hard freeze in January. Elliot Morozov, a plumber from the next town over, came out to fix it and left behind a handwritten sheet of winterizing notes I hadn't asked for and badly needed. My neighbor Ruthanne Dalby showed up that same first week with a bottle of Willamette Valley red and strong opinions about our fence posts, and she's been the person I call whenever something smells wrong ever since. Sometimes literally.

Each of those problems came with information we didn't know we needed until we needed it, so I started keeping notes. This site documents building a full homestead water system from scratch over three years: wells, storage, filtration, seasonal rainwater collection, gravity-fed systems, what it all actually cost, and what January does to a system you set up in September. We have chickens, and the chickens have opinions about water pressure (mainly about the thirty-foot run from tank to coop freezing solid in December). I've learned to take those opinions seriously, because they're usually right.

How I write about this

Everything here comes from what actually happened on this property. Costs are real numbers, because I wish someone had told me what this was going to cost before we started. Failures get as much space as successes, since that's where most of the useful information actually lives. I taught myself this entire system starting from zero: no contractor's license, no well driller's certification, no plumbing background behind me. What I have instead is three years of notes on what worked, what it cost, and what broke first, plus a habit of testing anything myself before I'd recommend it near someone else's well.

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Disclosure

Some outbound links here are affiliate links, meaning I get paid a small commission when you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I don't collect or store any data about which links you click. I only mention products we've actually used on this property. If something didn't work, the post says so.