Aquifers are nature’s infrastructure where large quantities of water are stored and moved from here to there very slowly over time. The well is man’s connection to this infrastructure just as a water service is the individual homeowner’s connection to a municipal infrastructure made up of water mains. Wells drilled in fractured rock aquifers sometimes miss a fracture and fail to make a connection with the infrastructure resulting in portions of land for which there is no water supply.

Instead of poking around for a connection to natures infrastructure at every building site we provide an engineered based on the principles governing nature’s system. It is possible to use a well of known yield and distribute the water slowly, as nature does, with the advantage that our system can lead the water anywhere – even to a lot that could not make a connection through a well – and store it at the place of use instead of in a central reservoir or water tower as municipal systems do. The large water mains current municipal systems use would no longer be required. Nature does it through a crack in the rock; we use a very small water line – ½" or smaller in diameter to feed each building.

A fractured rock aquifer with wells drilled in it is a Distributed Storage System, the difference being that the storage vessels (drilled wells) are connected by a random network of cracks; our network is made of small pipes that go where we want them to go and our storage is in tanks instead of wells. Storage is inside of buildings were the possibility of contamination from septic systems, buried oil tanks, shallow ground water contaminated with fertilizer and pesticides is eliminated and there are fewer wellheads to protect.

Each storage tank is located in the home it serves and each tank has a pump in it sized to the home just as each individual well would have.

Our work with Well Manager® has proven that a fill rate of 0.25 gallons per minute will support a family of 4 and produce plumbing performance equal to that expected from a municipal system using as little as 165 gallons of storage. A distribution rate of 0.25 gpm or greater per dwelling produces the same result in a Distributed Storage System.

All that is needed to make all this work is a well of adequate yield to feed the individual storage tanks at the desired rate and a way to manage it. This is the task for which Well Manager® was invented. With a Well Manager installed at the well location to keep the well producing and a Herculan ConstaBoost™ in each building to be served the system provides plenty of water, great performance and no one user can use more than their share.

The Well Manager®, located at the well house, is sized to meet the Distributed Storage
System’s maximum peak demand and set to harvest at a rate equal to or less than well yield. With 4 houses connected to a well and the ConstaBoost at each home flow restricted to .5 gpm, the maximum required flow rate that the Well Manager must produce is 2.0 gallons per minute. The Well Manager required to service this system is quite small – one with 160 gallons of storage and a 1/2HP PumpChamber™ would be more than adequate.

The immediate benefits of the Distributed Storage System are:

Beyond that, there are environmental benefits to using our Distributed Storage System. Every well that is being pumped has some influence on the surrounding area. This is because water moves very slowly through the ground flowing from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure. The rate at which it flows is determined by the pressure difference.

In the case of a well that is being pumped down, the nearby water starts flowing in immediately, draining the ground around the well while the more distant water flows in to replace that which entered the well. This difference in rate of travel results in a cone shaped depression in the aquifer around the well that gets shallower as you get further from the well, growing in size the longer you keep the well level drawn down. Once pumping ceases the depression slowly fills in as water from a distance moves toward the area of lower pressure. Because this cone influences the movement of water through the aquifer it is often referred to as a "cone of influence".

Over pumping (pumping the well way down) increases the radius of influence that a well creates on the local aquifer. This constant draining action can draw contaminants such as brine from nearby bodies of salt water, nitrates and fertilizers from adjacent farmland, or even leakage from underground storage tanks to your water supply. Because the Well Manager® is set to collect at the natural flow rate of the well, the "cone of influence" is drastically reduced and the influence of the well on the aquifer is minimized, while the available supply is increased.

Since peak demand at most homes occurs around the same time, all of the pumps in all of the wells in a development start pumping about the same time each morning. The combined effect of this simultaneous pumping has a much larger influence than that of one managed well. The environmental impact of a collection of homes connected to a Distributed Storage System could be less than a single home connected to a well that is not managed with a time based collection system.

Each home connected to the Distributed Storage System is limited to a fixed maximum amount of water available to them each day. This amount is determined by multiplying the number of minutes in a day, 1440, times the fill rate. In this example the maximum amount each home could use is 1440 x .5 = 720 gallons. A four-person household requires about 75 gallons per person per day so, in this example, there would be excess water available for outside uses.

With a Distributed Storage System, it is impossible for one home to inadvertently run communal storage or the well dry or to exceed their daily allotment though they can run the storage tank in their own home dry if a toilet were running or a hose were left on.

These uncontrolled losses can be limited using another of our products; our Stop Loss Control™. In new home construction this is accomplished by running a separate cold water branch to supply the toilets and outside faucets. All other cold and hot water outlets are fed from a different water main. With the piping arranged in this manner, a Stop Loss System can be installed on the storage tank in each home. A control box mounted on top of the tank operates a solenoid installed in the water main feeding the toilets and hose bibs. Two floats in the ConstaBoost tank let the control know when the water level is dangerously low and when it is normal. The low water float is set to the level at which the water line feeding the toilets and hose bibs will be shut off so that the tank will not be pumped dry. All other plumbing will still function when the Sop Loss turns off the toilets and outside water. The upper float is set so that the solenoid will be automatically opened when a reasonable level of storage is reached again. These levels can be set in the field to whatever levels the user finds appropriate. There is a reset button on the Stop Loss Control box that will open the solenoid as long as the lower float is up. This allows troubleshooting the reason for the uncontrolled loss without having to wait for the tank to refill.

A Stop Loss Control can be added to any tank storage system at any time.

If it is deemed desirable to disinfect the water delivered to each home, an inexpensive ultraviolet light with very small flow capacity can be used on the ConstaBoost fill line or chlorine can be added to the water storage tank or to the Well Manager tank in the well house.

Distributed Storage Systems will work for almost any water use; livestock watering using stock tanks as local storage; irrigation using tanks or ponds as local storage, etc.

Distributed Storage Systems can supply a number of homes or other uses on a well that would be inadequate for one home using a standard system. It provides protection from many sources of contamination, reduces adverse influences on the aquifer, forces everyone to keep their plumbing in good repair, prevents one individual’s irresponsible use from affecting other users or the general supply, reduces uncontrolled water usage and generally results in water conservation while at the same time providing superior plumbing performance to each building.

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