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 moved to five acres in rural Oregon in 2022 — two dogs, genuine enthusiasm, and a very incomplete picture of what running a rural property actually involves on the water side.

Year one was educational in the expensive way. Ran the well dry in July of 2022 — didn't know about well recovery time, drew it down too fast, pump sucked air. Two days hauling water. Pressure tank replaced in October. Creek turned out to have coliform bacteria — looked clean, wasn't, found out the hard way. Each of those problems came with information we didn't know we needed until we needed it. I started keeping notes because I knew we weren't the only people making this transition from urban life to rural property with no water system experience.

This site documents building a complete homestead water system from scratch over three years: wells, storage, filtration, seasonal rainwater collection, gravity-fed systems, what they actually cost, what the failure modes look like in different seasons, and what January does to a system you set up in September. We have chickens. The chickens have opinions about water pressure — specifically about the thirty-foot run from the tank to the coop freezing in December — and I've learned to take those opinions seriously because they are usually right.

How I write about this

Everything on this site comes from our actual experience on this property. I include real costs because I wish someone had told me what this was going to cost before we started. I include failures because that's where most of the real information lives — not in the "went according to plan" stories. Not a professional water systems contractor, not a certified well driller, not a plumber. Someone who had to learn a complete homestead water system from zero and kept notes on what actually worked, what the specific costs were, and what broke first.

Recent posts by Kate Winslow

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.