Chris Dean wrote:Water tank, horray! Any ideas or thoughts are welcome!
We are building a tank to hook up to be fed by a windmill as well as gutters (we have long dry spells, hence the windmill--plus we have a good windmill sitting around not in use, and an unused well by the house too). In addition we have a dozen 40 gallon barrels we'll attach to each other and attach to the new tank. The water will be used for watering plants, and as emergency-only, to-be-filtered drinking source.
We have a guy who's good with rockwork and has built cattle tanks for us before. Planning to coat the inside with thoroseal. Don't know about a roof--will probably have just a simple tin roof with leftover tin, not air tight or anything.
Our plan is to dig down until we hit rock (we are guessing this will be maybe 1-2 feet--it varies around the property from 2" to 4 feet) and lay the foundation there. From the inner base of the tank (where the water will sit) we'll put a pipe going out one foot up so silt/debris will catch in the bottom and not clog the pipe. Hopefully this will be underground (depends on depth of rock) to avoid freezing. This will go to an above ground faucet pressurized by the water in the tank.
That's the plan anyway. We've never built a tank like this before--is there something we're missing? Or anything that's crazy? 
Resurrecting an old post as a intro post. Flame away LOL, I can take it but really am interested in whether the OP wound up constructing a rock/concrete tank, and how he did it.
I'm in Gillespie Co., 35 miles sw of Fredericksburg, and would love to visit/email/have dialogue in some way, with him....or anyone else who has built precisely what he described in the OP...and find out what, if anything, you'd have done differently.
Strangely enough, I'm actually having to build up to have a little elevation from house to cistern site. Fixing to pour the floor in a few days then start on rock and mortar walls. Goal is ~3000 gal in tank, so about 7 ft inside diameter and 8 ft tall walls. Gives me enough elevation to get flow into the house at showerhead level for at least the top half of the thing and at tub spout level for 3/4 of it.
Interested in doing it the way it would've been done 100 years ago. There are 100+ year old tanks still in operation in the area but I've found nobody who actually remembers or has tried the local-local-local (excepting the portland) methods clearly used back then.
