Living here is sometimes more like camping than like occupying a regular house. Take for example my week-long spell without running water. I have 3500 feet of water lines, and about 1500 feet of it is unburied, mainly the segments running up and down the rocky hillside to the water storage tanks that provide me with the gravity pressure required for me to avoid needing to buy a pressure tank. During cold weather these pipes can freeze, which is a bit annoying, but hasnt really been a huge issue believe it or not since black polyethylene plastic is extremely durable and flexible and can expand and contract a bit with the pressure of ice formation so that they dont burst. Even the coldest weather in the past 16 years hasnt resulted in any difficulties. During this latest round of cold and the heaviest snow I have seen to date, the water line did the expected freezing by some time on New Years Eve. What usually happens is that the sun returns the next day, hits the black pipes, and thaws them, which returns a few hours worth of water flow to my house before they refreeze again. Even days that are barely above freezing have seen the pipes thaw, as long as its also sunny. I can live with this for the time being (as if burying a quarter mile of pipe on a steep rocky slope is a real option at this point...) because really, this only happens a few nights a year, and I can do the things that require running water in the mid afternoon and just use some stored gallons for the rest Its a minor adjustment of scheduling and expectations of convenience. Just like camping, as I said. But the pipes didnt thaw for days this time around. I figured that the several inches of persistent snow cover was responsible, and that as soon as it melted a bit more then Id see some flow. Finally, by Sunday January 4, when the temperature reached 50 degrees (13 C) in the afternoon and the snow was gone everywhere but in a handful of very shady spots, it finally occurred to me to go look if I even HAD water in the tanks. And sure enough, they were drained empty, all 3000 gallons gone. That was when I knew that the problem was not with the lengthy black poly lines, but with the short PVC section down by the well shaft, which was exposed for the first time ever via erosion by flooding I got from the remnants of Pacific Hurricane Odile on September 16, 2014. White PVC plastic is far more rigid and brittle than polyethylene plastic is, and sure enough, the entire 5 foot long segment was split open and the backflow check valve was shattered. Well at least the water all drained back to right near the well shaft, where it percolated into the soil, perhaps to be pumped again in the near future.... I didnt discover this until the middle of Sunday afternoon, when it didnt make much sense for me to drive the 50 miles into town just for a few parts to repair the system. If I am driving more than 100 miles round trip, I need to do several items to maximize time efficiency and gas expenditures, and Sundays when most things are closed isnt a good day to do that. So I decided that I could live without water for two more days: Monday to go buy the parts and run the other errands, and Tuesday to make the repairs. And today, being Tuesday, I have restored water flow to my house! It was a huge PITA however. Home Depot lacked one single part, which was the metal fitting that can join a 1 poly line to a 1 PVC line. Faced with a delay of at minimum several more days to order the right part online, I opted to try an experimental and admittedly substandard solution with a metal fitting that was close enough to maybe work, but really wasnt the right part at all for the job. Ill spare the details of how this went, but I will admit to a bunch of profanity being spit out over the course of about 4 hours this afternoon. I was sort of surprised that in the end, through trial and error (mostly error) I finally got the two types of water line mated together. Without leakage. So far, at least. It looks a bit like a GMO Frankenstein solution, but I do not care. Its going to get buried anyway, pronto, so that I do not need to face this issue again. It doesnt need to be pretty or meet plumbing codes. It works and thats good enough. -_- Chalk one up for additional monsoon flood damage, manifesting itself 4 months after the fact. I hope thats it. You certainly learn to appreciate basics like water and power when you go without them for such a long time!
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 03:03:35 +0000
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