Readers of this blog know that I periodically write about problems with our long waterline that collects water from a waterfall on Sunbeam Creek. Usually the problems that I write about are things that we have to deal with at our intake culvert up on the falls. Well, the other day we noticed that the water pressure in our house was starting to fall resulting in just a dribble of water coming from our faucets.
I called my neighbor Nick, who is the last person on our waterline, to warn him that we had a problem, but he quickly told me, that he had a bigger problem.
Our waterline ends at Nick’s. There it goes into an underground room, about 10 feet by 8 feet (3m x 5m) under a shed. Nick told me that there must be a leak in the plumbing in that underground room, because the room was now completely full of water to a height of four foot (1.2m). He couldn’t get down to turn of the water shut-off valve or to see exactly what the problem was because it was happening underwater.
Nick had rigged up a pump to pump the water out, but it was slow going because water from our gravity-feed waterline continued to flow in. I walked over to Nick’s house to see if I could help. The pump was slowly taking the water level lower, but it was very slow. Nick had used a rod and marked on it the height of his boots, so he check when the water level got low enough for him to stand in the water and feel around for the valve to shut off the waterline.
I spent hours over at Nick’s watching the slow progress of the pump, finally we started to bucket water out of the well house to aid the pump. Bucketing did make the water level go down faster, and eventually, it got to a level where Nick could go down the ladder and stand in the water without flooding his boots.
Using his hand swishing around in the water, he was able to locate the turn-off valve and shut off the water flowing in from our waterline. He was also able to see what caused the leak. A joint in the plastic pipe had come undone, so it seemed like an easy fix: Just dry the joint, add some glue, and put it back together.
At this point things seemed to be under control and I was a bit cold, so I went home. Later I checked our water and the pressure was going back up. Great, I thought, and started to resume my normal activities at home. Then, about an hour later when I checked our water pressure again, I was dismayed to discover it was going down again, so I called Nick.
Nick was back in the well house. It seemed he had used the wrong kind of glue to seal the plastic pipe and the joint didn’t hold, and had come apart again. Luckily, Nick was able to quickly turn off the flow from the waterline, but had to drive into town to get the proper glue to reseal the pipe.
Having to depend on a rural water system, means a lot of messing around dealing with the problems that arise. Having a problem at the lower end of our gravity-feed system, was a least a change from the normal problems that happen at the water intake at the top.
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