Scratching the Surface Some More

I thought I would bring you up to date with our recent adventures in getting a new water source to our house!  They say that most people take water for granted until you have none. Well, we had some... a slow dribble that made day to day life awkward. Years ago we lived aboard a boat with limited water and electricity and so knew all about the 'one appliance rule' and fast, fast showers! Our hot water tank was a mere 6 gallons in size. So here we are living in a full sized house and we were back to our old boat day rules: No flushing while someone was in the shower! You don't get scalded, but the water disappears entirely until the toilet tank filled! No showers or laundry during the dinner hour as the water was needed in the kitchen for dinner preparation.  The dishwasher goes on at bedtime when there is no chance of water being needed anywhere else in the house.  Laundry day was more like laundry week!

So last time I wrote on details, we had had the well drilled and this is what it looked like when they were done:

Yup, its a hole in the ground! A 182 foot hole in the ground to be exact.  Do you see the water around the base? The water would normally stay down at the level you find it at which in our case was 162 feet. We opted to drill another 20 feet and this would help serve as storage space. Well, imagine the surprise when they took the top off and the water was right to the top of the pipe, so 184 feet of storage! Then it started to dribble out as you see above.  The plumber Sven said we were darn lucky as this meant we would never actually draw on the acquifer and have plenty for our needs!   This sure sounded good but I was wondering how to get it to the house and out my taps?

No problem..... you dig another hole or trench rather..... 300 feet long to the house.  Here's the machine that did the deed:

The caterpillar tracks helped on the slopes but it sure chewed up the driveway!

From the well positioned behind the garage you come out to the front of the garage, where you dig up and break the existing irrigation line for the dug well (which was repaired and reburied)..... then start marching up the road....

Up the drive and across the bridge, where near the tree you find an old culvert bringing water from the neighbour's property under your driveway and onto your land. This was 'fixed' ... enough said on that.  :)

Then beside the drive where you deal with big tree roots

Then you hope your  line of new cedars haven't spread out their new roots too far yet!

Why stop there?   Let's go through the path and even the garden! Here they placed a junction box (see green box waiting) where they changed the type of pipe and its diameter.

Ultimately they drilled a hole right through the foundation and then pulled pipe through under the house which they accessed via the crawl space. Yes, it was a #%^&@% mess!  They covered it all up again but the ground is subsiding as the dirt compacts down and its not the nice (relatively clean) crushed blue granite you can see we had down.  A muddy mess which will most likely have to wait till spring to fix as winter is upon us!

While the men were working up by the house, I heard a little yipping noise and someone told Calli to be quiet.  Since Calli was lying beside me as I wove, so it wasn't her!  I got up to check and this is what I found!

This is Cali (short for Mexicali?) the Chihuahua!  One of the big tough guys had brought his little dog along and she was COLD ! I offered to bring her in and warm her up but her 'Dad' just tucked her into his coat and zipped it up.  No more yipping!

We had the well drilled right beside the garage so there was electricity near by and the well components can be mounted safely in the garage  and we wouldn't have to build a pump house. (These pictures were taken with a mobile phone so not entirely clear.)

This shows the main black water pipe coming in from the well and a pressure tank above. Next to it is the 'brains' for the pump which sits down at 172 feet in the well. It is set up to provide a constant pressure or PSI.

Here's the gauge:   (I can almost feel the full pressure showers now!)

So apparently getting the pump down the well is a task all unto itself! It has to be somehow suspended and sanitized and without touching anything settled down into the well which has also been sterilized. (You have always wondered about stuff like this right?)

Here Sven has a special derrick truck to lift the pump into the air. Meanwhile the well has been painted a bright blue so you miss it with the mowing tractor! There is some testing or cleaning going on right now.

Here's the submersible pump being readied for lowering down the well. Once this was completed, we had to 'develop the well' for a couple of weeks. This meant twice a day we hooked a garden hose onto the pipe fitting that comes up through the floor in the laundry room and run water from the new well for 20 to 30 minutes a time. This flushed out any fine sediment and debris that was created by the drilling.   This was a long two weeks and it evolved into three weeks with various delays. Next up is the final hook up to the existing water treatment system in the house and the cutting off and capping of the old well pipe.

In our laundry room what you see from the new well system is the pipe that runs under the house and then appears up from the floor, tucked in behind the hot water tank:

The lighter coloured small pipe takes water off to an outdoor hose bib ahead of the treatment system. The main water then goes to a treatment system that softens, filters and irradiates the water with UV light. Now its safe to drink and bath in!

So I did! This shower is the highest water appliance in the house and it was quite pathetic what we had before. Not any more!

....and for good measure I ran the vanity tap too!

There was no fluctuation in the water volume!  So that's all settled now and  we must eventually repair/ patch the driveway, then replant the garden come spring and make it so it doesn't look like the garden gnomes went bonkers!

Well, after an early winter storm that rolled through here yesterday, it all looks chaotic! We had some very high wind gusts out of the south east and in one to three gusts, the wind cleared off the maple and alders and the air was *full* of flying leaves, branches and other debris! I managed to sweep off all the decks and I literally needed a shovel to lift it all.  The power outage lasted 3 1/2 hours so not too bad for the first storm. The gutters on the house seriously need a cleaning now!

Apart from a small interior decorating job that we plan to start tackling in January 2012, that's it for reno's for the year! I've started my Christmas baking and writing cards....

Scratching the Surface

Right up front, this is a non weaving post! Sometimes life interferes with our pursuit of all things weaverly. I try not to let it get in the way of my shuttles but.... apparently Life right now insists on my full attention.   :)

We use well water here at our home and have installed a full water treatment system to keep it clean, soft and healthy for all our needs. We draw it (legally) from a shared well on the neighbour's property and then it travels some distance up a hill to our home. Water loses pressure when it travels up a grade and so our water pressure has always been a bit of an issue for us. The neighbour? he has LOTS and us? Not so much! The pressure this summer has been steadily going down to the point where if someone wants a shower, no one dares turn on a tap and even then the person in the shower has a nice dribble!
Awkward is one word I can use.... the rest are not lady- like to write here!. I have been caught all soaped up and there is no water at all until either the offending tap is turned off or the toilet tank is full again.
The dish washer runs at bedtime when there is no danger of interference!  It hasn't always been this way and our thirty year old home has had this shared well arrangement for all of those years and various owners of this house with limited success. We have always been water conscious and after living aboard a boat for five years with only 300 gallons in the storage tank, we are quite conservative with water usage. We just naturally fell into our old habits of  notifying each other of water events. "I'm going to water the gardens" meant reduced water in the house. We haven't watered lawns at all this year except for some newly sown areas after last fall's deck rebuilding.  The neighbour and well owner unfortunately wasn't helpful with solutions and quite grumpily said "its your problem" and hung up on us. (Some of my un-lady like language was reserved especially just for him).

So we began our research of the existing lines from the pump house and where they might be located. After thirty years where documents say they are and where they were actually placed are two different things! The codes and practices back in the late 1970's were quite different to what is done now. At best the pipe runs through a swampy area and even under a creek according to a former owner from that time period. Not allowed by today's standards !
If the galvanized fittings used in the 1970's have corroded, as one plumber thinks, and we were lucky enough to find and replace them, then some of the issues we have still exist. Lower than normal water pressure, a thirty year old system and a cranky neighbour who still owns the well!  So even a booster pump and cistern wasn't going to work and be quite expensive to boot!

What fix is the best use of our money and solves all the problems for us once and for all?

You drill a well.

Click to enlarge.... this was taken today and at this point they had gone through nineteen feet of overburden and and were just heading into bedrock. The wells in the area that we know of are all at about eighty five feet and produce ten to eleven gallons per minute, so this should come in at under one hundred feet. The exhaust is spitting out fine clay, surface water and now ground rock.  Its a messy process!

The height of the drilling rig is up at about fifty feet +/-. The length of the pipes are twenty two feet each and they are called casings. Apparently the well will be drilled, and capped by the end of the day if all goes well (no pun intended!)

Hard hat zone so I didn't get that close!  Noise was a bit hard on the hearing too. The cranky neighbour might know something's afoot by now. His well and (possible leak) is about to be entirely his problem.

Bruce and Calli were checking out the meadow when I arrived on the scene with camera in hand.

Here, she had just spotted me and came running right away!

This one isn't entirely in focus but I like it anyway.... if you enlarge it, you'll see she's smiling!  True story!

There will be a lot more to this water story as there has to be a trench dug up nearly three hundred feet to the house and the electrical and plumbing hook up's done before we drink our own water.  Won't that be sweet? I will celebrate by flushing while in the shower and run the dishwasher all at the same time..... just the once!

 Water report to be continued....at a later date....

Edit, 3 hours after posting : by days end they had drilled 182 feet and we have water at 6 gallons per minute. A bit deeper than we were expecting but feels good none the less!

This is the end of the drill bit.... not sure what those nubs are made from but you know it must be hard to drill through bedrock!

... and here's the water!  Not as many gallons per minute as we hoped for but enough at 6 gpm!  They run a stopwatch as they fill the five gallon pail and work out the rate. Boy, was the neighbourhood ever quiet when they stopped!