The ULTIMATE GUIDE to Off-Grid Solar Water Systems: Simple & Cheap to Fancy & Complex

This is a water tank. This is a solar panel. This is a battery. This is an RV pump. And this is all you need to get pressurized water on your property. Hi, I'm Jonathan. I'm Ashley, and we are Tiny Shiny Home. Our family has spent the last five years building an off grid desert homestead. And today we're going to take you through the evolution of our solar powered water pump house design that has provided us with pressurized water on our remote property, allowing us to mix soil to build earth back structures, wash dishes in our RV, drip, irrigate 70 plus trees, shower outside and even run a washing machine all without drilling a well or having power brought in. So far, we have built four pump houses. What started as a very simple idea has morphed over the years into a much more sophisticated setup. So today we're going to walk you through each version, what worked and what didn't. So you can decide which of these is going to make the most sense as you build your own solar powered water pump house. Disclaimer, before we get started, we are not electricians. We are not plumbers. We are not sponsored by any of the brands or companies that we're going to mention in this video. We just built this thing ourselves and we know it works. And we're sharing it with you. As always, you can watch this entire video or read the blog post on our website to learn everything that you would need to know to build this pump house. But if you'd like to say thanks or if you want to download high res diagrams of these plans, you can buy the accompanying guide at this link. And with that out of the way, we're ready to get started. We actually stumbled on this idea out of necessity. After pulling our 1972 vintage Airstream onto our raw land in southeast Arizona, we quickly realized that water was our first priority. Here, drilling a well is cost prohibitive to the tune of $60,000 or more. And because of unregulated big agriculture and dairy farms in the area, the water tables are dropping quickly. So we didn't feel like a well was a good investment. Long term, we're focused on rainwater catchment. But at the beginning, we had no roost to catch water on. So we had to get creative. First, we bought a 2,600 gallon water storage tank that was permanently set on the property. We'd throw a 330 gallon IBC tote in the back of our truck, drive to the nearby well share, fill it up, transfer the water to the big tank ourselves with a generator and transfer pump. Then we use the transfer pump to put 40 gallons into our fresh tank in the Airstream each morning. The onboard pump in the RV would then make that water come out of our faucets and showers. As you can imagine, that got old really quick. So we started dreaming up alternatives. Eventually, we would build a huge off grid solar system on the property. But at the time, all we had was the 2000 watt inverter in our Airstream. So we built out an entire version of this pump house with a power hungry pump and hard line PVC piping. And it didn't work. Make a rainbow, please. Nope. Because our batteries are 12 volt and we were inverting that power, even a small shallow well pump running on AC would just draw too much and it would trip the inverter. And then even if it did manage to occasionally pressurize it and not trip the inverter, the fittings would also leak. It was at this exact moment that we decided we needed to start over. How can we build an independently powered pressurized water system without investing in a much larger system or a bigger generator? Well, it turns out the answer was in our RV all along. After some tests, we realized that the 12 volt pump in our RV was powerful enough to pressurize the amount of water we needed and could be run on a battery and solar panel. Adding a pressure tank made the output more consistent and help put less wear on the pump motor. Plus, since the RV pump had a pressure switch and a check valve already built in, it made plumbing much easier for us non plumbers. Over the years, we've taken this simple idea and made it better, adding additional freeze protection, smart power monitoring, even filtration systems. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First, we need to build a structure to put all of this stuff inside. The pump, power system and plumbing all need to be inside of something so that they're protected from the elements. We've tried this a few ways and just keep coming back to two by fours and plywood. The size of this enclosure will really depend on what all you would like to put inside. But as a general rule, four by six is a great place to start. If this is just a temporary pump house, then you could set down some concrete pavers and build a two by four framed floor with insulation in it. For a more permanent pump house, you can pour a small concrete pad, put some bolts in to attach the frame to, put an overflow drain for when it leaks and stuff up some PVC pipes so you can bring water from the tank in and send it out to remote spigots. Build up your walls about three foot. Put plywood on the outside, fill the cavities with insulation and then build a slanted shed style roof with hinges so that you can access the inside. Bonus points if you slant that roof south to put your solar panel on or north, depending on where you live. Now, we usually build these half height boxes because if you build a full size one, then you have to start looking at doors and windows and it gets really expensive. Plus, there would just be a lot of wasted space for such a small pump system. But I mean, they can be hard to work on. My torso isn't long enough. And if you're like reaching way down into that cavity. So if you want to build a full height one, go for it. If you can place the box right next to your water tank, cut a hole in the back and slide the pipe coming from the tank through wrapping the exposed area with insulation to keep it from freezing. If you're in a colder climate and want better protection, take your pipe directly down into the ground and then up through the bottom of the box. Hopefully we've given you some good ideas, but really the box can be whatever you want. And we don't want to tell you how to do that, because the main point of this guide is to teach you how to put everything inside of it. Now we are going to start with our simplest version and work our way up. The simplest version of this pump house uses a Sure-Flo 3.5 gallon per minute, 12 volt pump. It's the exact same pump we've had in our airstream since 2017, and it's by far the most rock solid pump we've used. I think we've pumped thousands and thousands of gallons through multiple versions of these all over the property, and they just don't quit. Now, remember, power was our limiting factor with our original pump house fail, but with a 12 volt pump, this becomes much more manageable. To keep it simple, we recommend something like the 100 watt Renogy monocrystalline solar panel kit. It includes the panel, a solar charge controller, panel mounts and all the cables in the same box. Easy. Grab a deep cycle 100 amp hour, 12 volt marine battery. Now, you might be wondering, why not a fancier lithium iron phosphate battery? Well, flooded lead acid batteries are cheap, simple and work in pretty much any temperature environment. Lithium iron phosphates are a little more fragile. They need a BMS and a heater to keep working during the winter. So again, we want to keep it simple and reliable. Just go with the lead acid. Now it's time to start wiring it up. The first connections in line will be the positive PV cable from the solar panel to the positive PV input on the charge controller. Then the negative PV cable to the negative PV input. I would actually wait to hook these wires up until the very end because you don't want solar power coming through that panel and energizing the system while you're wiring everything else up. So we're going to do that last. And let's move on to the next step. Out of the charge controller, run the positive battery wire to the positive lug on the battery and the negative to the negative lug. Renogy's cables come with the ring terminals attached, but for all the other wires, you're going to have to make them up yourself. If you haven't done this before, I'll give you a quick tutorial. You'll want some wire strippers, a set of terminal rings and a crimper. The terminal rings have two measurements. The first is the wire size it will accept, and the second is the size of the hole in the ring itself. For this setup, you'll be using 12 gauge black and red wire. So you'll want a box of 10 to 12 gauge with a three eighths inch ring, which is big enough to fit on the post of the battery. To make the connection, strip the coating back so the copper is visible. Just enough so that when inserted, you can't touch the bare wire inside of the insulated area. Then using the correct color on your crimp tool, make a nice tight crimp. Yank on it to make sure it won't come loose. Then make up the positive and negative wires from the battery to the RV pump. Since we're not using a load center in this setup, you'll need to wire in an inline fuse from the positive wire of the pump to the battery. The SureFlow pump uses a 15 amp blade fuse, but don't put it in yet. We want to keep everything isolated while making up your wires. So leave it out until you're ready to start pumping water. Speaking of water, let's take a look at the plumbing side of this install. By using that small 12 volt RV pump, we can use half inch braided flexible tubing that attaches with hose barbs and hose clamps. There are a few benefits to this. Number one, it means physically connecting everything in a small space gets a lot more flexible. Number two, the clamps allow you to take apart, change things and repurpose without breaking anything like gluing PVC or crimping pexwood. And number three, the nylon fittings and tubing can slightly expand and contract, making it more resilient during freezing conditions. The pump itself also has several benefits. The check valve and pressure switch are built in, simplifying the plumbing. It's small and easy to mount in tiny spaces, and it uses very little power. Combined with an accumulator tank, it will give you plenty of pressure. I should say all of these plumbing diagrams are really just suggestions, right? My goal is to teach you all the different bits and how they might connect together so that you can design and build your own pump house exactly the way that you want. Cool. Cool. Now, as you start plumbing everything, remember that ball valves are your friend. This will give you a way to maintain or troubleshoot and separate all the different appliances and branches whenever you need to work on the system, which is going to happen eventually. Starting with your water tank, you want to shut off right at the source. This will depend on what kind of fitting your tank has. Our first one had a three inch threaded port, so we installed this huge three inch ball valve. It's kind of overkill, but it works. Most tanks will have a two inch threaded port, so install a bushing reducer and a heavy duty ball valve. From there, you'll just need to head to the hardware store and get whatever fittings you need to step down to a half inch female threaded adapter made out of PVC. Our first pump house had what we called a gravity spigot. It was a low point drain that would let the water come out without the pump if needed. That's where the first side of the T goes. On the other side of the T is where we switch over to the flexible tubing and the hose barbs. You'll be using a lot of half inch hose barb by half inch male NPT fittings. We recommend good quality plumbers tape wrapped several times clockwise and some pipe dope when you thread your connections in. Tighten by hand and then use a wrench to add a few more half turns. Don't over tighten it. Now on the pump side, you're going to need to get a few additional items. Buy the strainer filter and screw that onto the input side of the pump. I've never needed any tape or dope on this one. Just make sure you don't cross thread it. Then buy a half inch FPT by half inch barb straight swivel and attach it to the filter. Cut your flexible tube to the right length and slide on a 5 16ths miniature hose clamp on each end. Push the tube onto the barb all the way and then slide the clamp down near the end and tighten with a socket. I always try to adjust the hose clamp where I can easily access the head later for tightening or disassembly. Now you have water coming into the pump. Where does it go from there? For the purposes of this example, we're going to send it to an underground line, to a pressure tank and to a spigot right on the outside of the pump house. I recommend buying all your pieces and laying things out on the table before you start assembling. Even better, go ahead and thread all your hose barbs into your ball valve so that connecting the flexible tubing goes quickly. On the output of the pump, add another one half inch FPT by one half inch barb straight swivel and connect your first ball valve. This way you can stop the pressurized water coming out of the pump in an emergency. The half inch ball valves have female threaded connections, so you're just adding the male threaded hose barbs to each side, connecting them together with the flexible tubing and clamps like before. To have different or separate lines come off of this main pressurized line, we're going to introduce the half inch nylon tee. It's the same idea. Slide a clamp on, push the hose onto the end of the barb and then tighten the clamp. The first branch should go to your accumulator or pressure tank. RVs use tiny ones, but for a setup like this, we like to go with at least a 20 gallon. This doesn't mean that it actually stores 20 gallons of pressurized water. It's usually about half that. But either way, it gives you a really good buffer. Starting with the pressure tank, you're going to need to transition from a one inch steel threaded pipe to a half inch hose barb. Our most successful version of this uses a reducer to go from one inch to half inch male NPT and then connect the ball valve straight to that. From here, you can add a second tee to run your underground PEX line if you need it. Our pump house needed to send pressurized water to our airstream over 100 feet away. So we converted from the ball valve to a half inch male NPT to PEX adapter and ran that through the floor. Note that you will need half inch PEX crimp rings and a clamp cinch tool if you want to do this. On the other end, we built our own water spigot with a steel tee fitting, plug, threaded pipe, elbow and hose bib, all below the frost line. Of course, if you need more freeze protection, though, I recommend looking into a frost free hydrant. Finally, off the last end of the tee, we converted to PVC with a half inch male adapter and added a simple spigot by drilling a hole through the wall of the pump house and using some plumbing strap to hold the PVC to a stud. Sometimes we'll drill the hole a little bigger and wrap the pipe at the end and insulation to help during the winter. This is pretty minimal freeze protection. In the second version of the pump house, we'll go a little deeper on how to keep things from freezing. But for now, it's time to start testing. Close all your ball valves and then open the ball valve from the tank to your pump and put the fuse in. The pump should turn on and then almost immediately turn off because it's going to pressurize itself with all the other ball valves closed. And systematically open each ball valve and test for leaks. And I would leave the pressure tank for last, because once you fill that thing up and if there is a leak, you're going to have to drain all that water out and you're going to waste a bunch of water during this process. Finally, open your spigots and make sure that pressurized water is coming out. If you have a leak, don't panic. Hose clamp leaks are easy. Just tighten them up a bit. Threaded leaks are harder, and sometimes they can be fixed by undoing the nearby clamp and tightening it half a turn. If this doesn't fix it, then you're taping your dope job just weren't good enough. It can be really tricky to find this balance, so don't get too discouraged. Remember, the beauty of this system is that you can take it all apart without breaking anything. Now we need to set your pressure tank. Use a bicycle pump or any air pump that shows the pressure reading and let the air out until you're at 25 PSI. This is because it needs to be 2 PSI lower than when the pump turns on. If you end up getting a different pump, you'll just need to find the specs on that and adjust appropriately. When set correctly, the SureFlow 3.5 gallon per minute pump will take about 10 minutes to fill the 10 gallon availability of a 20 gallon pressure tank. So just be patient. If you're fully pressurized and leakless, go back and make those solar panel connections to the charge controller and set it to flooded. Close your lid and let the sun fill your battery. This system is oversized, so as long as you're using the pump a fairly normal amount, you have a decent amount of daylight hours and the panels actually pointed towards the sun. You shouldn't run out of power. Congratulations. You officially have your very own solar power pressurized water pump. But maybe you have questions. What if it gets really cold where you live and you want more assurances that this won't freeze and break? What if you want to be able to remotely monitor the battery, solar input and temperature inside the pump house? What if you want to run additional loads off the 12 volt battery? And what if you want an easy way to turn the pump on and off without opening everything up? Good news. In the second version of this pump house, we're going to address all those questions. Oh, hey, you're back. I am. Sometimes when you deep dive, it gets a little too nerdy for me and I can't do it. That's OK. Let's talk about the second version of the pump house, though. Just just the high level. And then you can peace out again. Some of the very first upgrades we did on our system centered around freeze protection. Now, we do live in the desert, so we don't need a ton of freeze protection. But maybe you do. Well, yeah, and actually we are at 5000 feet. We do get snow here. It does get into the single digits overnight. So we definitely had a few breakages and problems. We're always thinking about how we can design things here on our property that don't require a lot of mental overload. This is a great example of that. Do you really want to have to remember every night that it's going to freeze that you got to drain your pump house? No, of course not. So we're going to tackle this in a few ways. Number one, better insulation. Number two, low powered heating. Number three, temperature monitoring and notifications. Number four, frost proof spigots. So I'm about to get nerdy again. I'll see you in a little bit. Yeah. You can use the plumbing steps from pump house number one for most of this. The few important changes. One of the main ways to protect against freezing is just to add more insulation to the pump house. So maybe build your walls with two by sixes. So there's a bigger cavity to fill. This means you get a higher R value with more insulation. Your weak points are always going to be where the water is closest to the elements. So earlier we said our water spigot was the most vulnerable. This is because the ball valve is right where the handle is. If that freezes, the water expands and you can get a crack in your ball valve. Yes, this has happened to us. An easy way to get around this is to install a long frost free silk cock in his place. These work by moving the opening and closing valve further inside the building. You can buy them in different lengths. We always get them at least eight to 12 inches to make sure they are as far away from the cold weather as possible. When you turn them off, the valve closes inside the structure and it's slanted so the excess water drains out. Water coming from the tank can also be run underground below the frost line and insulated on its way up through the floor. Keep in mind that the connection at the tank will need some freeze protection as well, depending on your climate. From here, we can start getting a little more nerdy with an upgraded power system that monitors usage and temperature. We can add additional low power heating elements, keep track of our batteries, voltage and even set up alarms that can notify us a freezing temperature inside the pump house no matter where we're at. We'll be utilizing Victron's excellent VRM portal to enable detailed remote monitoring. We found that their products are also rock solid. Their software is really well designed. It gets constant updates. It's just a good system to invest into. So here are the basics of a Victron system. Battery storage. Like we said earlier, we're using a 12 volt 100 amp hour deep cycle lead acid battery. These are easy to grab pretty much anywhere, fairly inexpensive and resistant to the wild temperature swings we can get here in the high desert. They're tough and they don't need fancy BMS or special protections. Solar panel. While using that small 100 watt panel is big enough for this size system, we've been using a larger 240 watt Santan solar panel because they're just so cheap. The smart solar charge controller. Since we're sticking with the Victron ecosystem, the smart solar 75 volt 15 amp is the perfect size for the 240 watt panel without breaking the bank. Smart shunt. In order to relay the data about the battery state of charge, the Victron smart shunt quickly connects to the battery while also having a data connection port. In addition to these, you'll also need a GX device from Victron that acts as the central brain for the system. Then you have to have a network to connect the GX device, too, so it can push the data up to the cloud. So the first hurdle here is obviously you have to be connected to the Internet. So you have a few options. The Wi-Fi or Ethernet based Servo GX is the most powerful brain you can get. You can even add an LTE antenna for connectivity, but this increases the cost and you have to pay for the plan from your carrier that would give you access. The cell based Global Link 520 comes with a five year LTE plan and gives you a simpler way to connect and monitor the system. We have a really nice fiber Internet and Wi-Fi mesh set up now, but when we built our first pump houses, there was no Internet out here. So we opted for the Global Link 520. Thankfully, the LTE network is pretty extensive, but you should double check to make sure there's coverage in your area. This example uses the Global Link 520, but just so you know, you can switch it out for the Servo GX if you already have Ethernet or Wi-Fi available. We will show you how to connect the Servo in the third version of the pump house. Turns out these plastic storage totes from the hardware store are a great off the shelf solution that don't cost much. A 12 by 26 by 18 bin is the perfect size to put your battery in and a few pieces of scrap wood for mounting everything for easy access. The walls are thin and easy to drill through to install rubber grommets, to run wires through. While they aren't water or air tight, they do provide considerable protection for everything. Plus, since the lid isn't sealed, the battery can still vent. This allows you to wire up everything inside the box, except the solar panel and the loads, carry it where you want and then run those wires in when you're ready. Just so you know, I'm going to try to get through this electrical part as quickly as possible. But if you have questions or you want more details, we have an entire article and video that I'm going to link up here and in the description that you can go check out. We are moving into the wiring phase, so there's a few things to keep in mind. Number one, while connecting your system, make sure everything is off. All the breakers, all the fuses, all of it. Number two, do your best to run all positives together and all negatives together so that you're completing the circuit at the last step. Number three, always cover your battery post so you don't short anything with an accidental tool drop. And number four, make these connections and we'll go through the boot up process at the end. Earlier, we learned how to make ring terminal connections. For this system, you're going to add a few more things to your arsenal. You'll also be learning how to use spade or butt terminals and screw clamps. I recommend having wire strippers, crimpers, screwdrivers and a big box of connectors on hand. For this setup, you can use 10 or 12 gauge wires other than the wiring that might come with some of these devices. So we're going to start with solar. We mentioned earlier that we're using this 240 watt panel from Santan Solar. It runs at 37 volts and eight amps, and the PV wire is usually 10 gauge. Step one, you'll want to start by running the PV positive and negative wires to a two pole 10 amp circuit breaker. This is to protect the charge controller from any spikes coming from the panel. Number two, from the breaker, we go to the positive and negative PV in connections on the Victron Smart Solar MPPT, 75 volt, 15 amp. Step three, coming out of the charge controller, the positive wire runs through a 25 amp mini ANL fuse and cover to the positive post of the battery. This is an additional source of protection for the battery from any spike that might come from the charge controller. Step four, from here, we come off of the positive post of the battery through a 25 amp DC circuit breaker. Step five, we add a small fuse block or load center. This will allow us to isolate each item we want to connect and fuse them individually. Now for the rest of the Victron gear. Step six, the Victron Smart Shunt connects its battery minus side directly to the negative post of the battery. The system minus side is where all the other negative wires will connect together. There's also a VBAT plus wire that connects directly to the positive battery post. Step seven. Finally, the Global Link 520 is hardwired directly to the positive and negative post, so it always has power. At this point, you can also connect the solar charge controller and Smart Shunt to the Global Link with VE.Direct cables so they all start talking to each other. Now the Global Link and Smart Shunt should be on. You'll want to install your ANL fuse so the charge controller can turn on as well. Before we connect any loads, let's make sure we tweak the settings in all of the Victron gear to work with the battery in the system that we're installing. The easiest way to change settings is to use the Victron Connect app on a smartphone or tablet. This is done by Bluetooth, so you just have to be close by and you'll see the option to connect. We're just using generic 12 volt lead acid battery settings here. Make sure you check with your battery manufacturer to see if you need to do anything different. So we set our battery capacity to 100 amp hours and our charged voltage to 13.2 volts. We left all the other settings as is. Now we need to tell the charge controller how to charge the battery. Set the battery voltage to 12 volt. Tap user defined for battery preset. Choose absorption 14.3 volts. Float 13.4 volts and equalization 14.3 volts. Finally, we need to connect this whole Victron system to the VRM portal. If you don't already have a VRM account, make sure to create that first. Then click add installation and choose the global link 520 icon. It's going to ask you for the VRM portal ID that's located on the back of the global link. It might be on the box if you still have it, but learn from my mistake. Before you install the stuff, take a picture of all the numbers on your Victron devices before you have them in place. Pop that number in, give it a name. And as long as the global link is connected to the LTE network, you should see it load in your VRM. That's it. To keep data usage low, the global link updates every 15 minutes and you'll see your solar input wattage and battery state of charge. And now that you're connected to the VRM, you can set up your own alarms and notifications, run custom widgets and reports. But we'll get to that in a minute. First, we need to run our loads. We'll be upgrading this setup by adding an RV tank heater and a switch for easy access to power loads on and off. The biggest difference between pump house number one and this pump house's electrical system is that now we have a load center. This means we'll be connecting the positive wire from each appliance to an individual spot on the load center and then adding the proper size blade fuse, which should be one and a quarter times the max amperage. It should drop the negative wire for each appliance. We'll go to the system minus side of the smart shunt. Now, I know that all of these breakers and fuses may seem a little over complicated, but we are dealing with more high end gear. You know, the Victron stuff isn't cheap, so we want to protect all of the stuff as much as we can. We don't want to overheat anything. We don't want to start a fire. Adding all of these protections is a good thing long term. I also like to add a switch to the outside of the pump house. As you have seen, reaching down in there can be really difficult. And so if you need to shut something off, like before you head out and leave your property for a while, being able to just flip a switch on the outside is so much easier. This can be done by running the positive wires from each fuse to the switch of your choice, a negative wire back to the smart shunt and then connecting both positive and negative wires from each appliance to the switch. The switch should be rated for all of the appliances that you want to power and be able to turn on and off. So if you're using an eight amp water pump and a five amp tank heater, the switch should handle at least 13 amps. Jury's still out whether these tank heaters work, but theoretically, once they reach a certain low temperature, they will turn on and they should provide some extra warmth inside your pump house. Now, the final step is to complete all of the circuits. So install your individual blade fuses for each appliance and flip on that 25 amp circuit breaker. If you install the switch, now is the time to turn it on and make sure things are working. Finally, flip the two pole 10 amp circuit breaker and confirm that the solar panel is charging the battery. This is easy to see in the Victron Connect app or in the VRM if it's connected. Now that the base system is set up, it's time to enable temperature monitoring and notifications. If you're using the Globalink 520, you're going to need to use a wireless sensor. The Ruvi humidity and temperature sensor works perfectly in the Victron ecosystem. Download the Ruvi app on your phone, pull the plastic battery stopper out and then find the device via the app. Here you can set a few settings, but really what you're doing is activating the sensor so that your Victron gear can see it. I've come into the smart devices setting and you can see the Ruvi tag is right there. So I'm going to turn it on, activate it. And that's pretty much all there is to it. You just need to wait until the VRM refreshes to see everything. Remember, it updates every 15 minutes to create custom notifications. Go into that installation in the VRM, go to settings, alarm rules, and then select add new alarm rule. Choose the Ruvi tag as the device, then the temperature parameter low of 33 degrees, clear low alarm above 35, high of 120, clear high alarm below 119. Then just make sure you have settings and push notifications turned on inside the app, and you'll get notified if it reaches any of those parameters. Fancy. All right. Are you ready to talk about solar pump house number three? I could not be more ready. Good. Temporary pump houses are a super important part of setting up raw land and having water available. But eventually you're going to want to do something a little more permanent. Right? Yeah. Maybe you're going to pull your airstream into a more permanent spot under a carport. Exactly. So when we did this, we took everything we've learned and we took that opportunity to design an even better pump house pump house number three with these important upgrades. Number one, a permanent concrete floor. Number two, filtration system for hard water. Number three, shut off loop for maintenance. Number four, high flow pump for additional fixtures. Number five, AC power backup. One of the best things you can do to make your pump house more permanent is to pour a concrete pad for the floor. This allows you to create a clean separation from the ground and a much nicer surface to work with when building out the inside. Here are a few things that we recommend. Add in J bolts around the perimeter for your framed walls to attach to build an overflow drain just in case something leaks and stub up insulated pipes to the underground water input or output later. Now, the inside of pump house three is very similar to the inside of pump house two, but I'm going to let Jonathan tell you all about it. Take it away, babe. OK, the first upgrade you can add is a higher capacity pump. The Seaflow 55 series diaphragm pump gives you five and a half gallons per minute to run multiple things at a time. So if you're trying to get a shower and wash dishes at the same time, you won't really notice a difference. We found the higher flow pump to be super helpful while irrigating over long distances, too. However, the increased amperage demand from this higher capacity pump can be problematic for small 12 volt systems. If you decide to switch over to the higher capacity pump, here's what you'll need to do. Plumbing wise, not much is going to change. Use the same fittings to slide the half inch flexible tube on and wire in the positive and negative wires. Like we said, this pump uses a lot more power and maxes out at 17 amps. This means you're going to need to upgrade your blade fuse to a 25 amp and make sure that the switch is rated for that additional load. If your wires are long, you may need to increase the gauge size as well. Always use a DC wiring size calculator just to make sure. And remember, when calculating, you need to use both the positive and negative wire lengths. So double the physical distance because it has to complete that circuit. So it has to include both of those wires. Don't forget to adjust the pressure in that accumulator tank. It needs to be set to 15 to 16 psi for this five and a half gallon per minute pump. Next, we're going to add in filtration and descaling. We catch as much rainwater as we can, but sometimes we have to haul water in from a local well share. We've noticed it's very hard water and it clogs up our shower heads and sink faucets. So out of the pump, we'll go to the pressure tank first, but immediately tee off to the filters in the bypass loop. The idea is that we want all the water to pressurize and then be filtered before it goes out to the spigots. But we also want to make sure we have a way to bypass that filter system if we need to work on anything. Coming out of the pressure tank, use another half inch nylon barb tee to start the loop. On one side, there will be a ball valve that stays closed during normal operation. On the other side is a ball valve that begins the filtration. First is a spin down sediment filter. This will collect any large sediment and help the other filters last longer. Note that you'll need a three quarter inch male NPT to half inch hose barb on each side. Then you can use something like the A.O. Smith whole house filter combined with their salt 3D scaler to ensure better quality water coming into your house. Both of these use that larger three quarter inch male NPT to half inch barb on each side, and you do want to follow the instructions for flushing before installing. So the order is number one, spin down sediment filter. Number two, whole house filter. Number three, descaler. On the output of the descaler, add another ball valve tee back into the line and that completes the bypass. When you need to replace these filters, simply shut off the ball valves at the beginning and the end. Turn on that other ball valve so that the water keeps flowing through so you can use your system while you're doing that work. Easy. Also, I should say that that filtration system, you know, will filter the water that comes out of your faucets, whatever it's connected to. Doesn't necessarily mean I would drink or cook with it. I would do some additional filtering for that. From there, you just run your half inch flexible tube to whatever fixtures you like through the wall of the pump house underground to somewhere else. Whatever works for your specific setup. Finally, we'll explore a different way to keep tabs on your temperature and add AC backup. Now, in the second version of the pump house, we assume that you may not have Internet yet. So we said to use the Globalink 520. By the time you're ready to build a permanent pump house, you might have Internet set up. So this wiring diagram is going to explore what the Serbo GX looks like. Instead, the benefit here is that you can connect it directly to Wi-Fi or Ethernet and use a simpler hardwired temperature sensor instead of the wireless one. You'd still connect your charge controller and smart shunt via VE direct cables and then use the temperature input on the Serbo to connect this hardwired sensor. Programming your notifications works the same. Just choose the new sensor and input your values. You might be thinking by this point, if this is a more permanent install, why are we making this so complicated? Why are we doing a whole solar system with shunts and batteries? Couldn't you just run 120 volt AC power, get an AC pump and just make it way simpler? Totally. We've actually done this in some more recent buildings where the water wasn't as critical. However, if you would prefer your pressurized water not to rely on your main power system, keeping that 12 volt backup is a really good option, and we can make it even more reliable by adding an AC backup to it. Redundancy is good. Everything will stay the same in the power setup, except we'll add a Victron Blue Smart IP65 charger that plugs into a standard outlet and then connects directly to the battery to keep it topped off. We found that with the larger five and a half gallon per minute pump, the AC backup really helps because it can get stuck on an endless loop, drawing the battery voltage down, trying to reach the pressure shut off and not being able to because the battery voltage gets too low. Then the battery dies. The longer that I've used this five and a half gallon per minute pump on a small 12 volt system, I'm not convinced they should have even made it. It's it's just seems like it's too high of a draw. You can only use it for short periods of time before you start having problems. The good news is that by adding that AC charger, it not only keeps the battery topped off all the time, but it can augment the battery and solar charger to ensure that the pressure is always reached quickly. Charger comes in several options and sizes. We went with the 12 volt 15 amp version and kept it on default settings. Connect the negative line of the smart shunt for more accurate readings of the power coming in. And there you have it. It's the fanciest solar pump house you'll ever see. Yeah. Now, don't forget, these are just options, right? So you can take bits of solar pump house one, two and three and mash it together and make your own thing. It's kind of the beauty of a modular system like this. Now, I'm not going to do a full cost breakdown. We do that in some of our videos, but this thing has gone on way too long. And I don't want to bore you, but you can find links to each individual piece of all three pump houses in the article on our site. And of course, those links are also included in the downloadable guide as well. So what kind of pump house person are you? Are you a one, two or three? After years of failing, succeeding and experimenting with so many pump houses on our homestead, we hope that these hard fought plumbing and electrical tips give you a better understanding of how to build your own simple or complex solar powered water pump house. If you enjoyed this, make sure to check out our playlist linked in the description below of all these do it yourself how to guides. We cover multiple solar installations, a Wi-Fi mesh, gray water septic permaculture and more. There are so many things happening here on the tiny, shiny homestead that we would love to share with you. Yeah, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss our next project. Until next time, friends.