Water Plan

Okay, let's imagine two houses. One near the sea has a city water supply, the other on the top of the mountain does not due to its remoteness. Here's a crappy drawing.

The house painted green has a city water supply, the house in orange is a remote house in the mountains where land is cheap. The orange house has a solar-panel and battery water supply, a rain condenser, and other engineering supplies, but is still short on water. While I suppose the most cost effective solution is to pay the nearest city to build pipes to the house, this blog is all about the awesomer, but less practical solutions. We're going to pipe jack all the way to the freaking ocean.

The pipe will be straighter than that, of course. We install a fine mesh filter at the bottom, water processing equipment like a storage tank, a desalination machine, and so on in the basement, at which point the basement will look something like this:

We can then insert the large (and extremely long) screw , attach a gear to it, and attach the chain to an electric motor.

For cheap, a small piece of the sea is pulled up into the basement every second, where we can pipe it through the desalinization machine. Now we have a ready supply of fresh water and brine. We can drink the fresh water, bathe with it, wash the dishes, and water the lawn. As for the brine, we can discard it through the nearest sewer, where it will flow back to the ocean, or we can boil it and sell it as sea salt, which fetches quite the price these days.

The main issue with this is legal: land ownership deeds traditionally describe the landowner's property as extending all the way to the center of the earth. I would need to get permission of every landowner that the pipe traveled through, which makes it a tad impractical for the places that could really benefit from this.