It RAINED! Is Cistern holding water?? Plus, Advice!

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:10]Well, it looks like a quarter of an inch.

[00:00:16]Just since I put it in yesterday. So, that's a lot better than nothing.

[00:00:24]And I know we got at least an inch the day before.

[00:00:28]In case you're new here, this is my cistern.

[00:00:31]Okay, here's where I think the leak is.

[00:00:35]Right in in the middle of the light there, there is a rough spot in the wall.

[00:00:43]And they punched a hole in the wall.

[00:00:46]Uh it was just pouring out overflow when I came here. Now, I don't know can you see the ridges in the floor? That is a reflection of the rafters. So, you can see barely see the line of the floor down there.

[00:01:08]Floor is darker than the wall.

[00:01:10]And you can kind of see there's it looks like there's at least 4 ft of water in there.

[00:01:17]Um that means >> [sighs] >> that means somewhere around 3 to 4,000 gallons.

[00:01:27]So, that's great.

[00:01:30]Now, we'll check on it later and see if it's leaking out.

[00:01:34]But I am suspecting that that's the culprit right there. And it should be a quick fix after we drain it.

[00:01:46]Okay, I've been talking about my cistern for you know, in a lot of videos because um it was leaking so badly last year.

[00:01:59]I just sort of said, "Okay, I don't know what to do about that." And you know, at some point when you have so much to deal with, you just go, "Okay, I don't know what to do about that. So, I'm just not going to think about that."

[00:02:12]You know, and that's Am I in the center of the screen? I think so.

[00:02:18]And so, that's basically what I did last year. I just didn't think about it.

[00:02:23]Because there's so much else to do during the season. And then when the season's over, it's just like, "Shh, I don't want to think about that." You know, and anyway, I didn't have anybody to fix it. And so, I just didn't think about it. And so, for a whole year, not no progress has been made on the cistern.

[00:02:44]Very briefly, if you are new here, welcome to my channel. I am a former urban gardener where I started my channel in Los Angeles specific specifically Pacific Palisades, which was destroyed the majority of which was destroyed by fire in 2025.

[00:03:04]So, my Late Bloomer Garden 1.0 and my home that I did a meticulous green renovation of in 2006 was all destroyed.

[00:03:19]And so, that was the one of the big blows from last year.

[00:03:24]Uh it seems like every year there's been a big personal blow, but I'm carrying on. And so, one of the attractive factors of this property, although I don't know if I would have bought it without it, but it was the cistern. When this house was built in 1988, the people built a concrete block building. It's sitting concrete blocks sitting on a concrete pad with an an out pipe, a cleanout pipe, drain pipe going right out of the bottom like out of the bathtub.

[00:04:08]And that is 8 and 1/2 by 25 ft.

[00:04:12]So, it's tied to a five downspout system off of this two-story house. I have a very pitched roof, and I'm told 1 in of rain on the roof puts 1,000 gallons in that building.

[00:04:28]So, very attractive if, you know, the grid goes down, you know, I've got a water source. This is not a great area to drill a well because there's a local zinc mine, and it makes the water taste bad. And this was reported to me by uh one of the first people that lived out here when it was still just a dirt road.

[00:04:50]Uh she they put in a well, and it just it smelled bad, it tasted bad, and they they basically she went to town to do her laundry. So, the people that built this much later than she was. She was here in the '60s.

[00:05:11]And this was built in '88, they still didn't have city water out here.

[00:05:16]And they didn't have gas. They put in gas in the '90s. I think maybe it was '91, I'm not sure. Anyway, all that said, as the cistern is very attractive for somebody who wants to be able to take care of themselves in a grid down situation, which basically we all want that, right? We don't want to be dependent on you know, big daddy for everything, right? Because that comes at a cost, a severe cost, depending on, you know, the uh politics of the of the moment. Um I mean, for example, I went down to pay my registration.

[00:06:02]Well, I went down in '25 to pay my registration.

[00:06:07]And it had been like $40 or something like that for my Prius.

[00:06:13]And they said, "Oh, it's going to be $140." I I don't know exactly, but that's I'm giving you an idea.

[00:06:21]I said, "What What happened?"

[00:06:23]Well, they they charge a uh they're charging a tax because you have a hybrid. So, all electric and hybrid vehicles we're we're just charging this flat extra fee in perpetuity until it get until it gets voted out, which of course it never will. Do taxes ever get voted out?

[00:06:45]And so, I can I thought, "Well, at least I've got the truck, which is a fully gas vehicle. The Colorado is a fully gas vehicle. So, I didn't even look at the thing. I went in there to pay this time, and she goes, "It's $140." I said, "What What happened?" She said, "Well, they raised the the price by $100. They voted that in recently."

[00:07:12]Why?

[00:07:13]Road tax.

[00:07:15]She says, "And it'll be every year until they vote it out." I'm going, "Yeah, they're never going to do that." So, anyway, you never know about all this stuff, which is why it's so great to be as independent as you can and to have a water source.

[00:07:31]And I was just writing this to a follower of my channel today who was inquiring about moving to Tennessee. And I said, "The first consideration is land and water source.

[00:07:43]You can always put in a wood stove, but you can't create a spring out of the mountain, you know? So, that's uh that's the most two most uh important things in my opinion.

[00:07:59]Mhm.

[00:08:02]Now, that is cold, but that's okay.

[00:08:04]We're going to talk about that in the next video I've got planned for you right here.

[00:08:08]I'm making a bunch of videos. Yes yesterday I made two. Uh the the second one will be up tomorrow morning.

[00:08:16]I put up one this morning called Crisco versus Lard. You want to check that out.

[00:08:21]And that's in my Health Matters playlist. Play on words, health matters.

[00:08:29]You can use matters as a noun or a verb.

[00:08:34]matters Well, what did Health matters. Health matters. It health is the adjective, matters is the noun. Or you could say health is the noun, and matters is modifying health.

[00:08:48]I loved grammar. It was my favorite subject.

[00:08:52]I had a wonderful English teacher. Okay, I digress. The cistern. So, Corey, my mower and uh handyman, occasional handyman, he has he has uh in in '23, he power washed he crawled in that thing and power washed it. He spent hours with his uh power washer her generator power washer out there and got it all clean, probably for the first time in 30 years.

[00:09:29]And it I was so excited because there had been E. coli found.

[00:09:36]I mean, I took samples to the water district, and they for free they they they ran an E. coli test and just the general metals and so forth.

[00:09:46]And and at the same time, I didn't tell them, but I took two samples. I took the sample of water from my rain gauge in a in a freshly sterilized jar and a sample from the cistern down there and they both had E. coli and I made a video about that and it's my second biggest video of all time.

[00:10:13]It's in the rainwater.

[00:10:15]Okay, we won't get into all of that. But at the time I I was trying to figure out what could have contaminated the water down in there?

[00:10:25]Because I you know, people would say, "Well, you got a a dead mouse up in your uh gutters or No, I've got the gutter guards all over because it's a very sophisticated system of downspouts which feeds into a pipe and I want to give you some advice if you're thinking about setting up something.

[00:10:46]I It leads These These downspouts go into 4-in PVC that run along the side of the house towards the downhill towards that corner and downhill from there is the cistern, okay? So, that goes into a concrete square at the corner of the house and there's a mesh like rabbit fencing or something to keep any leaves or big particles of debris out.

[00:11:18]And then it it goes down there. Well, there's no way rather than a ripping the whole thing out to stop the water going in which makes it difficult to find a good opportunity to to clean it out.

[00:11:37]So, when this happened in '23, I think it was August when it was really dry, I just went ahead and and uh eliminated the water and then he went in and cleaned it out. Well, when he did that, he knocked something loose and from then on I've had a serious leak. It won't hold very much water.

[00:11:58]Well, at one point Corey came with the his excavator and we we we dug out, you see in '21 when I got here, they had punched a hole in the wall at ground level as an overflow.

[00:12:15]You know, they I guess they just weren't using it, they didn't want to deal with it. They They knocked a hole in the concrete block. Well, that always creates a weakness, right? It was patched repeatedly and uh I had the guy in '21 that worked for me patch it and so I actually in '22 had it coming from the built-in overflow which meant it had uh over 10,000 gallons.

[00:12:42]In '22 we had so much rain and it was coming out the top and it was holding.

[00:12:47]Well, there was all this stuff at the bottom and then of course in the in the end of '22 I did this test and I thought I I've got to clean it out. There could be dead animals at the bottom or something causing this. So, we located the out valve which the yard had grown over it.

[00:13:08]Didn't even know where it was. I didn't even know I had one.

[00:13:11]And the man who actually built the house, he lived down the street, I got in touch with him cuz he's a radiologist in town and uh he came over and I met him and he said, "Oh, it was right right about here." And I'm going we just dug down, it was right there.

[00:13:26]But I wouldn't have known. So, got all that cleaned out and everything and then after that Corey did the power washing, got it all cleaned out and I thought, "I'm good to go." Well, then it had a serious leak, it wouldn't hold water.

[00:13:40]But it was hard to determine how much water it would hold because rain is always whenever it rains, it's always going down the pipe. So, if you're thinking about putting in a cistern number one, a lot of people recommended just put in a tank, K? Just put in a tank because concrete block eventually is going to leak.

[00:14:04]Put in a tank, either a metal or a plastic tank. It needs to have an out, a cleanout. You know, a drain pipe.

[00:14:13]And it also needs You also need to have it so that you can your input pipe needs to be able to be moved off of the tank in order and and let the water go down around it or something in order for you to have an opportunity to clean it out, especially if you get rain consistently. We haven't had rain this spring. So, this is the first big rain, so that's why we went down there and checked it out. So, anyway, Corey pointed out that the other day that it's where it's holding is where the leak is and I'm going, "Duh!

[00:14:51]Duh! I've only been thinking about this for like 4 years!"

[00:14:57]And you know, when we when he opened it up, it looked like it was coming from the seam, you know, where the concrete block comes down and sits on the concrete pad.

[00:15:06]It looked like it was coming out there.

[00:15:08]But that could be rushing cuz it's the down most downhill spot, it could be coming around the building and just going out. So, it's really hard to tell.

[00:15:17]And then the other day I was at the Lebanon Distributing and he said, "Well, if you've got concrete blocks sitting on a concrete pad, it's probably coming out of that seam which reinforced my idea that of what I had seen when he opened it up and I said, "Oh, okay, so the whole thing needs to be patched all the way around the bottom."

[00:15:38]Okay, and so Corey agreed to go in and do that, but then he said, "Hey, look in there and see where it's holding.

[00:15:47]That's where the leak is." And I'm going, "Wow, it was much higher than that."

[00:15:53]And I think I had at that time I think I had 2 and 1/2 ft which is to about 2,500 gallons.

[00:16:00]So, 1 in of rain 1,000 gallons.

[00:16:04]So, 10 in of rain 10,000 gallons and then overflow. And that's only happened since '22 because of the leaks.

[00:16:13]So, long story short, I am going to use this water and Corey just got me a new um um nozzle uh water shutoff down at the lower because also in '22, it's a long story, I'm sorry, but if you don't know anything about it, it's been quite a journey.

[00:16:37]In '21 the guy that was here, I had this bright idea, "Let's poke a hole in the wall.

[00:16:43]Let's dig down, poke a hole in the wall and run a PEX line all the way down to the lower garden because if you've seen me wrangling these hoses from the house which is is 200 ft to the garden."

[00:16:55]I Yeah, well, I mean I have to have I have to have 150 ft to get there and then the garden is 5,000 sq ft, so I need hose to walk around and water stuff.

[00:17:10]So, yes, I know I know I know I need drip irrigation.

[00:17:15]That's been an issue, too. I have Believe me, I bought a I think it was $400 uh dri- 1/4-in drip line from Host Tools.

[00:17:25]It's still in the box out there. I open Every time I I get the idea, "I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it." You know, I open the box and go, "Oh!"

[00:17:33]You know, I had a I had a garden this big in California and I had drip line and even that was complicated. The front yard was literally 20 by 10.

[00:17:45]What is that?

[00:17:46]>> [laughter] >> 200 sq ft and that's 5,000. So, and and each year I try to do things a little bit differently. So, every time all of this piping would have to be changed and the 1/4-in piping, I mean it takes all day.

[00:18:04]You know, and then the water has to come from here.

[00:18:08]Well, so anyway, I am getting closer and I'm going to take you on a tour when it's all working, okay?

[00:18:15]So, I just wanted to give you an update on the cistern, but for the first time in a year and a half I'm hopeful, okay?

[00:18:22]So, I I hope that information is helpful in some way.

[00:18:26]Get yourself a water source so that you don't have to rely on city water.

[00:18:31]Contact your water department no matter where you are and find out if they put fluoride in the in the water. They may not. That's a huge worry off your mind.

[00:18:41]They stopped putting it in the water here in 2010 because it was so toxic and the people didn't want it. The The The people who lived here didn't want it.

[00:18:51]So, even if you have it you can start a petition. You can go to your city council, start a petition and say, "We don't want it."

[00:18:59]And if enough people sign that petition, the city council hopefully will listen and put pressure on the water department or the water department may may be going, "We don't want it anyway because it is it is so hazardous for them to handle it. It is so toxic. They have to be fully fully suited to just to just pour that st- uh Okay.

[00:19:23]I've said enough.

[00:19:25]God bless you. Thank you for listening.

[00:19:26]I'll see you next time.

[00:19:31]Cat Lover out.