Water, Three Hours, and A Couple Thousand Dollars

It was just a week ago today that I wrote my post on showers and water.   On Friday morning I got up, went to our bathroom, turned on the water and...no water!!  I walked out to the living room and said to Dan, "We have no water!"  He checked and of course, I was right.  He went downstairs and began checking:  the pressure tank, the well, the room where we have the water softener, et al.  Meanwhile, I was wandering around upstairs, in my nightgown, saying, "I have to go to work today!"  

Back he came and said he thought he could do some kind of quick fix that would last long enough to get me to work.  He did, and I stuck my head in the kitchen sink and washed my hair with cold water (not wanting to let the water run long enough to get hot), all the time thinking of Mma Grace Makutsi.  At least I was indoors.  

It turned out that our lovely water had eaten though a section of a fitting on the rust removal tank and clogged the hose leaving us with--no water.  Dan stopped by the shop later that morning to tell me he'd fixed the problem. Yay!!

Fast forward to this Monday morning.  Dan told me he'd heard the pump on the well going on and off all night long.  Not a good thing.  He suspected we had a leak somewhere.  He checked all over downstairs and looked at the lawn between the house and the well.  The first year we lived here, we had a leak in the connecting pipe on this very same week of March and he'd had to dig it up and replace it.  He found no water saturated ground, so we decided to wait and see.  

Last night even I was awakened by the pump cutting off and on.  This morning Dan took the top off the well, and as he said, he could hear water "hissing like a snake."  He called a pump service in a nearby town and they said they could be out in an hour.  We decided that if we had to go to all the work of replacing the pipe in the well, we'd just as well replace the pump.  We'd had to replace the pump in 2001 after it quit one weekend when we had company. (We were so thankful our neighbor allowed us to run a hose from an outdoor faucet to our pressure tank so we could at least flush the toilets!)  This pump was now twelve years old, and we had no guarantee on how much longer it would last.  

Fortunately we have big gates into our back yard, so the truck with the hydraulic boom was able to back right up to the well.  Here Dan and the pump man contemplate the situation.  

Up goes the boom and down goes the hook to start pulling up the pipe.  Our well is 250 feet deep.

Hooking onto the first piece of pipe:

Finally, on the tenth length of pipe the leak was discovered.  They knew it was this one because the previous nine lengths were dry--the water was leaking out below them, and this one was 3/4 full.

We gave up on iron pipe and went to plastic.  Our water has a bacteria in it that eats iron, so hopefully the  plastic will last a lot longer.  Who ever would think plastic would work better than iron?  The arrow in the picture below points to the new pump getting ready to be attached to the first piece of pipe.  On the ground the man is attaching stainless steel connectors to each piece of plastic pipe.  

And now, three hours and a couple thousand dollars later, here's our yard, looking just like it did before.

And we're thankful.