peach, If this is a money making operation and is large enough, go the professional route. If there installation or product problems, they will fix them. I recommend a licensed contractor and get at least three bids. If you hire a landscape designer that will provide you a plan to go out to bid with, see if he can oversee the work quality for you. Make sure he is independent from any of the bidders. Otherwise we can help you get there but there is no guarantee when things don't turn out as expected. In any case, find out your water source pressure and flow rate. That info will be needed in any case. JMHO & GL. Aloha

I'm currently spot watering a 2-acre market garden (mixed vegetables) from a dug well. So far (two years), I've gotten by mainly with rainfall, but this year I want to have a reliable source. The goal is to have a reasonable volume of water available for dry spells, but not necessarily to water all the time. The field is more or less flat, and dips down in one corner, where we intend to dig a pond, 20' x 50' or so, by as deep as possible (maybe 8'-9'). This would be done by a high hoe contractor. There is no electricity available there. For getting the water to the field, which means up the slope and then about 500' to where the garden starts, the plan is to get a gas generator and a shallow well pump and a reservoir tank (I'm also looking into sprinkler pumps, which may eliminate the reservoir?) For distribution to the field, the idea right now is to duplicate the existing well set-up, which is 1" PVC flexible pipe, attached to a faucet off the barn well. It goes about 300' to the garden, and then down the length, which is about 450' (x 200'). I'm not sure what the current PSI is, but we can get about 4-5 GPM right now, and the pressure is fine for hose work, and running 200-300' of soaker hose or drip tape (that's the extent of what's been tried). So I'm hoping that the pond solution could work as a simple switchover from the well connection. For delivery to the beds, the current plan is a combination of drip tape and various spot methods (lawn-type sprinklers, soaker hoses - I realize sprinklers need quite a bit of pressure). Depending on the crop, some beds would be set up with permanent drip tape (in place for the year) and could be turned on as a zone (sections are 50x50, with 500' of tape to cover all beds per section). For other crops, it'd be manual, either dragging in fast soaker hose, or sprinker, or by hand. I don't want it to be too makeshift, but on the other hand, I can't see (budget, time) laying in a full drip system. I want to get the pond in place, and be able to deliver the water as a first step. I imagine this is a fairly common general situation (drip from a pond). Do you have any suggestions, warnings, comments? Thanks!

"The last option would be to use it to heat the cold water coming into your shower." I know about drain heat recovery options, but I had never though of putting it on the cold water side for a shower. Thanks, moandtg, for contributing. I will look at it in a different way. This sounds like the best option. When you start stacking water heating options on top of each other, you don't get additive economy. For example, if you save 50% with solar pre-heat and 20% with your shower hot water in series you will not get 80% savings. It is a little hard to compute the exact figures because it will depend on the weather. In addition, the higher the temperature change, the more efficient the heat transfer is. By pre-heating the water going to the solar, you actually decrease the efficiency of the solar heating process. That is why you are better off installing a cost-effective way to heat the cold water. Note that I am not saying that drain heat recovery devices are cost-effective. I have not evaluated them. If you pre-heat the cold water to the shower, you should get additive heat efficiency. In addition, the plumbing will be greatly simplified and less costly. The heat losses in the between the heat recovery unit and the other water heater will be gone as well!

Hi Ed. So the person you really want to hear from on here is Aliceinwonderland. That said, here's my 2 cents. You can't really design a filtering system until you get the water sample tested at a reputable independent lab. Water reports aren't all that helpful. There are some things that will come back in that test that will significantly change the design of any treatment system (such as iron being present). If you are concerned about chlorine, consider the higher cross-linked resin in a water softener. I think that carbon filtering all of the water going through the softener would be vastly more expensive (in filters) and introduce more pressure drop than just changing out the resin in 10 years. In my home, I have a big blue housing and carbon filter on the drinking water, but not anything else. My toilets just don't need carbon filtered water. Note that pressure drop is not a good indicator of a carbon filter's ability to remove contaminates. There look to be some very high-flow applications (multi head shower, large tub) that you need to put some numbers to as far as gallons per minute. Those numbers are important in the design. You will also need to determine how many gallons per day used in the household. I think a normal estimate is 75-80 gallons per person per day. Just a couple tips about PEX: Pex pipe is cheap, but the brass fittings are stupid expensive. After doing my manifold / filter / tankless setup in pex I realized it would have been much easier / cheaper in copper because of all the fittings. After the manifold it makes sense to use pex. Also, pex has a smaller ID and the fittings fit inside the pipe, rather than outside the pipe like copper. Don't assume the same flow rates for 1" copper and pex, for example. So, to reiterate: Post back here when you have your test results. Provide the GPM on the high-flow uses. Also let us know how many people in the house so we can estimate the gallons per day. Lastly, reconsider doing whole house carbon / sediment filtering using big blue filter housings and instead think about filtering drinking water.