For the moment, the weather has turned seasonal: pleasantly cool and sunny with crisp mornings that never go near freezing. But we had frost in September, which tells me I need to be using this interlude to button the place up for winter.
Last January I suffered a design flaw in the Lair’s plumbing and had to do an emergency repair that eliminated all means of shutting off water to the cabin. Those of you in freezy climes know that it’s really important to be able to shut off the water. So before I could bury all the cistern valves for the winter, I needed to fix that.
The pipe is a bit deeper than I remember, but this spot has gotten quite a lot of silt deposition in the past few years.
It’s kind of an issue, though, because the valve cover I bought last spring is way too shallow.
Fortunately I never throw anything away, and I still have some lengths of this old 8″ stovepipe. Have hacksaw, metal screws and gaffer tape, will travel.
That black flexible pipe sticking out of the ground goes 500′ up the ridge and connects to the manifold at the cistern tank on high ground. Lots of other parts of this installation have given me trouble, but this hasn’t. It drops almost exactly fifty feet, according to GPS. I don’t get a lot of volume, but I do have good pressure. And the flexible bit makes inserting components into rigid pipe a lot easier than it usually is.
And there ya go. I’ll stuff the pipe with fiberglass insulation for winter; so far that has always worked.
