posted 15 years ago
There are cisterns designed to be incorporated into building walls. This boosts the thermal mass of the house, and (usually) prevents freezing of the cistern. Obviously, there has to be some way of handling condensation when room air is warmer than the cistern...ideally, it could be collected, and added to the cistern, but I'm not sure that's been done.
Depending on the local climate, solar heating and/or geothermal cooling might eliminate the need for a heat pump.
If all you're interested in is getting enough water to plants, building field capacity might take you farther than building cisterns for a given amount of work and money, though of course they're complimentary methods. Plants that leave a lot of root mass in the depths, and good soil management in general, can give you a huge amount of storage within a year or two.
"the qualities of these bacteria, like the heat of the sun, electricity, or the qualities of metals, are part of the storehouse of knowledge of all men. They are manifestations of the laws of nature, free to all men and reserved exclusively to none." SCOTUS, Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kale Inoculant Co.