We woke up yesterday morning with failing water pressure, an hour later, we had no water. Glen, the neighbor who usually helps me fix the water when there is a problem was away visiting on Vancouver Island and Nick, my other neighbor was at work, so we had to spend the morning and afternoon without water. I am so thankful that many years ago I built an outhouse for just such emergencies.
I figured there were three possible reasons for our lack of water:
1. Our filter at the falls was covered with debris, but that seemed unlikely since there was still so much snow on the ground, and I couldn’t see that much debris would make it into Sunbeam Cr.
2. Somehow the water flowing under the ice on the falls got diverted and took another channel, bypassing our culvert and the water level got below our intake and didn’t flow into our waterline.
3. Our waterline froze up during our cold nights. This was the worse scenario. Last time our waterline froze, we were well into April before it thawed and we got our water back.
After Nick got off work, we hiked up to the culvert to see if we could figure out why we had no water. Generally a big thick ice dome forms over our culvert, this time we found that it was iced over, but the ice dome was not so tall and there was a bit of a hole above our culvert. We could see the wooden watergate. (Photo above shows Nick standing on the ice over our culvert. The brownish spot below his front leg is the wooden watergate for our culvert.)
Luckily Nick had brought a pickaxe along and was able to chop through the 8-10 inches of ice over the culvert making the hole bigger.
After some more chipping away at the ice, we were able to access and lift the wooden watergate which allowed the water to flow out of the bottom of the culvert, with the lowered water level it gave us access to our filtered intake. We saw that it was covered and clogged with debris, so with the filter exposed, I figured we might as well change it.
Glen always keeps a clean filter in his shop, so I told Nick I would hike back down to the truck, drive over to Glen’s, get the filter, and bring it back. By the time I returned, Nick had cleaned a lot more of the ice away from the culvert and opened the watergate more, lowering the water level and he had removed the dirty filter.
We put the new filter on, lowered the watergate back into place, and the culvert once again started filling with water.
We hung around a few minutes until the culvert was full, then hiked back down to the truck and home.
At home, I was greeted by a happy wife, because water was once again flowing out of the taps. I was pretty happy too.
My iPhone tracks my activity and I was surprised how much exercise I got after the two climbs up to the culvert. It was the equivalent to climbing 24 flights of stairs.
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