New Build - Not Water Tank in Attic

Educate

In the process of designing new build house. Architect we are engaging has said there's no need to have a water tank in the attic anymore as it's all managed from water pumps. Has suggested placing water tank and pump under the stairs.

Curious if this is now the done thing?

Conscious that there'd be no cold water if the electricity went out or the water pump failed.

Sleeper12

With the set up he is suggesting you will need everything pumped. This includes the toilets. Flush at 3am and the pump kicks in. I would prefer to have the cold water tank in the attic and not having the toilets connect to a pump.

There is nothing in the regulations against what he suggests but I believe in practice the attic tank is the best option.

P2C

I self build 13 years ago. I have no tank in the attic or non gravity based system. I have an outdoor water tank. I also have a small pump house outdoors. Still using original tank and pump. Just make sure pump and inlets don’t get frozen. Mine survived those big freezes in 2010/11. Upside - stopcock or water leaks can be avoided from the attic particularly as normally cold space and the main reason I done same was to avoid the noise from gravity based systems. Downside - power cuts basically means you have to use a bucket of water😂

Educate

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121035111#Comment_121035111

It might be due to the house being a 1.5 storey, so there is quite limited attic space...

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121035502#Comment_121035502

Ah good to know there are others out there with this. They are putting all water tanks under the stairs so we'll at least not have to worry about the outdoor water freezing once the gulf stream stops in a few years... I'll also get a few spare buckets! :)

happyplants

Just coming to this with interest. My current set up (I didn't build it) is unusual. We have a well which we pump water out of. Then that gets pumped from a plant room to a water tank in the attic. Then that gets pumped back around by the house by a pump back in the tank room. Its very odd and from what I can tell the result of some difficulties during the build with teams being fired and others having to conclude work half done etc.

Anyway, my thinking is that since I am doing all this pumping, I might as well move the tank down to the plant room and avoid the noise at night and the pain in the hole of getting up to fix ball-cocks etc. Like I'm always going to be pumping water from the tank room, so instead of pumping to a tank, I may as well just pump from the well into the tank, and pump directly to the house.

antoinolachtnai

This is a sound idea. The only problem is that you will have no running water during a power cut.

Sleeper12

You might want to get a plumber to look at this for you. At the very least one of the pumps will need to be replaced with a negative head pump.

Much simpler & cheaper option is to put the pump from the attic tank on a timer or timer plus a switch. You can set it that pump won't kick in between 10pm & 7am for example. It just means that the toilet will take longer to fill between these times. I believe this option will work out several thousand euro cheaper than moving the tank downstairs. As mentioned in the post above moving the tank downstairs leaves you with no water during a power outage