Harvesting/utilising water from a seasonal spring creek

Hi guys, new here. I live in Northern Tasmania, Australia, and have recently bought a 25acre bush block. On the block is a small creek (approx. 1 meter wide) that flows quite fast after some decent rain. The water will stick around in the creek for a couple of weeks after. I assume This property has quite a high water table, as there are various springs that exit the creek bed when there has been enough rain. It will eventually subside and stop flowing all together if there is no rain to keep the springs going. Keep in mind this is in summer (we've had a wetter than average summer), I've yet to see much of the creek in the wetter, colder months, but I think it's safe to assume that during this time the creek will flow quite regularly.

I'm currently relying on rainwater, this isn't ideal as I don't have much roof catchment space as there is only a small shack. So if I could harvest as much of this water as possible that would be great. I've thought about capturing and storing this spring water in tanks, but they can be quite costly, and I will mostly need this water in summer which happens to be the driest part of the year, so the creeks springs will mostly be dried up. Another potential option is damning various sections of the creek? Not sure if anyone has any experience with this?

Would love the hear peoples thoughts on how I can utilise this spring/creek water. Thanks! 😊

Any rules to worry about? Round here streams are generally Off Limits, cuz fish.. unless you have a license from way back.


Are you talking water for household and a garden, or market garden and 15 people and a herd of cows?

No rules to worry about for this little stream. There wouldn't be any fish as the stream often has no water in it. Just for household and a garden feeding 3 people 😁

One reason communities build storage dams is to ensure there is water during dry periods.
Its the same in households, storage tanks big enough to carry over the dry spells enable people to live in them.

It is necessary in budgets to allow foir tanks, thinking they are costly should not be an issue, since land purchase, shack building etc would be more than a tank.

You need to work out the volume of water you will need for say 3 months, rainfall data will tell you how many dry months there are.
The tank should be that big at least.
Extra catchment can be created with tarps hung around and draining to the tank.

As for lifting water from the creek when it rains, its possible.
Some questions?
Can a tank be installed above the elevation of the shack so gravity works for you?
Can a pipe be fitted into the stream diverting water to the tank without using a pump?
If the answer to these questions is yes, then building a small dam with a leaf and stick trap would work well.

Depending on the distance from the dam to the tank, the biggest size pipe the budget will stand is best.Sat 90mm stormwater would be great down to 50mm poly pipe.
The tank will fill faster with he bigger pipe.
A smaller pipe can be connected to the shed, say 1 inch and it will be adequate for flow and pressure. Assuming you have at least 4-5 meter height distance between the bottom of the tank, and the top of the shack.

You could maybe try to develop a spring box that would fill in even the drier months, and then just filter smaller amounts for use with something like a Berkey filter. At our cabin we use spring water we pump to a 55 gallon drum. Then, for cooking and drinking  I filter first with a prefilter (see later in post) and then using 2 stainless steel stock pots and an inexpensive ceramic filter that I made a into a diy "Berkey" I use the drip filtration. I keep 1-2 large stock pots of that filtered water, and for other applications (that we don't ingest) we just use prefiltered water (run through a fabric filter like felt to remove sediment).

John C Daley wrote: One reason communities build storage dams is to ensure there is water during dry periods.
Its the same in households, storage tanks big enough to carry over the dry spells enable people to live in them.

It is necessary in budgets to allow foir tanks, thinking they are costly should not be an issue, since land purchase, shack building etc would be more than a tank.

You need to work out the volume of water you will need for say 3 months, rainfall data will tell you how many dry months there are.
The tank should be that big at least.
Extra catchment can be created with tarps hung around and draining to the tank.

As for lifting water from the creek when it rains, its possible.
Some questions?
Can a tank be installed above the elevation of the shack so gravity works for you?
Can a pipe be fitted into the stream diverting water to the tank without using a pump?
If the answer to these questions is yes, then building a small dam with a leaf and stick trap would work well.

Depending on the distance from the dam to the tank, the biggest size pipe the budget will stand is best.Sat 90mm stormwater would be great down to 50mm poly pipe.
The tank will fill faster with he bigger pipe.
A smaller pipe can be connected to the shed, say 1 inch and it will be adequate for flow and pressure. Assuming you have at least 4-5 meter height distance between the bottom of the tank, and the top of the shack.

Thanks for the info. Yes our property is sloping, we are currently running a gravity system that the previous owner installed, it needs some work though as the pressure isn't great. We have two tanks, one 22,000 and another that's probably about 2000. Rainwater catches in the big one and we pump the water up the hill into the gravity tank.

Unfortunately the part of the creek that has the most flow is down the bottom of our property, so we would need to pump it up to one of the tanks. Was thinking possibly a RAM pump might be worth a look into? I'm also tossing up whether to look into getting a bore (well) put in as it might be cheaper in the long run than investing in more tank storage. The fact that we have springs coming out of the ground after some decent rain would suggest that there is a good amount of groundwater about, and that they wouldn't need to drill very deep.

Pretty interesting info. Glad to be a member.