The Norwesco 1450 Gallon Underground Water Storage Cistern Tank is a buried polyethylene cistern built to hold 1,450 gallons of water below grade, freeing up surface space and keeping stored water cool and out of direct sun. It measures 51" high by 60" wide by 157" long, with a 60" x 157" footprint and a single 20" lid for access and servicing. The white polyethylene body carries a 1.9 specific gravity rating, so it is engineered well past plain water and into denser liquids if your plans change.
Will it work for your site?
For an underground cistern, the two numbers that govern your install are weight and burial geometry. Filled with water, this tank weighs about 12,093 lb (~8.3 lb/gal x 1,450 gal), and its maximum rated contents weight is 22,977 lb, which reflects the 1.9 SG rating rather than water alone. That envelope tells you the excavation, bedding, and backfill must be specified for a fully loaded buried tank, not an empty shell. Use the 60" x 157" footprint to lay out your hole, and remember that total excavation depth is the 51" tank height plus the cover you need over the crown. If you are still settling on volume for a rainwater catchment, fire reserve, or general water storage, run the numbers through our Tank Sizing Calculator and the Tank Sizing Guide before you dig.
Plan your plumbing around one lid
The technical drawing on this page shows a single 20" lid and no factory-installed bulkhead fittings or outlets. That means every inlet, outlet, vent, and overflow penetration is field-added through or around that lid, so you are sourcing and installing each fitting and gasket yourself. Confirm your bulkhead and gasket compatibility before the tank goes in the ground, because reaching a leaking penetration after backfill is exactly the situation you want to avoid. The 1.9 SG rating is also a quiet upside here: this is the same shell rated for liquids up to roughly 15.8 lb/gal, so if your plans drift from water toward a denser liquid like brine or certain fertilizers, you have headroom without stepping up to a different tank.
Install and acceptance
Underground tanks are unforgiving of a sloppy hole, so the prep matters as much as the tank itself. See the technical drawing on this page for lid placement and dimensional layout before you order fittings or pour any structure around the tank. Once it is set and plumbed, fill and hold it before backfill is finished so you can catch a fitting leak while it is still reachable; our hydrostatic test methodology for new-install tank acceptance walks through fill discipline, settlement monitoring, and hold-time math. Buyers using this cistern in a captured-water system should review our industrial water reuse tank topology guide for grey-water, rainwater, and condensate aggregation, and rural sites planning a fire reserve can use our fire-water reservoir design writeup for NFPA 22 sizing and the cold-climate freeze protection that matters when you set burial depth below the frost line.
The mistake to avoid
The most common error on a unit this size is treating it like an above-ground tank. An underground cistern is rated for burial loading, but the surrounding soil and backfill carry the structure once it is in the ground, so the excavation and bedding specification — not the tank wall alone — determine whether it survives. Get the hole, bedding, and backfill right for a fully loaded buried tank before you set it, and verify the 20" lid will be accessible after cover.
This Norwesco cistern ships LTL, freight quoted live to your ZIP, from a single plant in Griffin, GA. Because it is a single-origin item at 157" long with a 22,977 lb rated capacity, distance from Georgia is a real freight driver and the ZIP quote matters more here than on multi-warehouse SKUs. Get an exact number with our Freight Cost Estimator, or call 866-418-1777 and we will quote underground water storage tank freight to your delivery address.
