Water Supply

[eden8]

Hello guys,

May i know how do you deal with water supply?

let say you have a house several km away from the town area..

[stoneyboy]

Catch rain water.

Drill bore hole.

Have it delivered.

Tap into the neighbours source.

Lay pipes from the town.

To name but a few.

[villagefarang]

We are more than 50 km from town but our village has great water, all we had to do was connect to it. I know friends who rely on wells, so the situation will depend on where you settle.

[SantiSuk]

Thats the important point - most villages of any size (say over 1,000 people and some smaller villages) have a deep well, tower and distribution system. Distance from a town is irrelevant to whether there is a local water distribution system or not.

Water is pretty cheap in my village - just less than 4baht a cu.m. Village water pressure will depend on the height of the village tower, distance from tower, robustness of pipe system etc. If you like strong showers and gushing water you may need to add a pump to your house water system (say 15,000 baht)

People who can afford to do so often have a water well and well-pump as back-up, with either a water pressurising system (floor level pressure tank and pump) or tower or both. To bore a well will cost anything from 10,000 to 25,000 baht depending on depth needed, difficulty and negotiation skills. A well pump and tower with a tank on top would be in the range 30,000 to 100,000 depending on tower construction and tank size/material. Your father-in-law building a brick and reo-concrete roof height tower with a plastic big bucket-like tank is at the cheap end and a building firm erecting a high steel tower with a hi-grade stainless steel tank is at the other.

Once you have a well your water cost is likely to be half compared to village water (it is not free - you need electricity for the well pump). The saving in water resource cost is not sufficient to justify installing your own well - payback period would be a lifetime unless you are watering a huge garden or have a huge swimming pool (still decades to payback), so flexibility of supply is the usual reason to go down that route. If you rely on village water alone then prepare for periods of explained and unexplained cut-off by installing some storage reserve capacity - clay ongs, plastic tanks or stainless steel tanks. There is a thread live on TV at the moment exploring the relative merits of different storage systems.

I had no idea of all the different considerations when we built our house, so I went with the flow (pun not intended). Village system and pumped to house to start with, water tower and well when we built a swimming pool. The local water man objected at the thought of his precious village water being sucked away in the dry season for a bluddy foreigners avarice (and who's to blame him).

Ignorance is bliss - to start with, but five years later you start wishing that you had built an integrated system incorporating roof collection systems and a concrete storage reservoir under the house!

I'm no expert - above based on own experience in Isaan and reading stuff on Thai visa!

Edited May 1, 2013 by SantiSuk

[SantiSuk]

Should have added that if you are building your own house then you also have the option of puttting your 'tower' and tank in the rof of your house. I don't know whether a single story houe would give sufficient height for the head of pressure you might want - I presume a two story house would.

I have often mused whether I would trust a Thai builder to construct a house with 10- 20,000 cu.m. of water in a steel storage tank above my head as I sleep . I think I would definitely want a regionally recognized commercial/domestic builder with my own supervising engineer for that bit!

[scorpio1945]

Quality answer.