The water tank on top of the ridge is nearly full at last. This afternoon I’ll turn the pump off. And every morning for the past few days I’ve trudged up the slope to see how much the water level dropped during the night when the pump wasn’t running. And every morning I found that the level hadn’t dropped a fraction of an inch. There’s nothing wrong with that part of the water system I didn’t break myself. Apparently I just thought I checked the level, but didn’t.
So it was time to open that expensive new ball valve and send water down to the Lair’s yard. This isn’t quite as simple as just opening the valve, because of all that goo in the bottom of the tank which is now most certainly in the more than hundred yards of underground pipe between the tank manifold and the yard spigot.
Pull the yard hose out of storage, hook it to the spigot and uncoil it downhill. Go up the hill, open the valve, come downhill and open the spigot. After several seconds the hose will spit red goo, then it’ll run orange for anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour…
Eventually, no matter how much you may come to doubt that it’ll happen, the hose will run clear.
And at that point, I have water back in the yard. Not in the actual cabin yet, of course, because there’s still that broken shut-off valve that needs to be dug up. Honestly I considered holding off on this step till sometime next month or even April, because when I fix the shut-off valve I also want to tear out the plumbing to the cabin and do more insulation-related retrofitting and I don’t want to do that in February. Today’s warmish except for the wind, but the cold is coming right back. And now when I do that, I’ll basically flood the yard emptying the pipe from the tank. But most of that water can be shunted downhill with the hose, and at least now I can haul water for dish washing and toilet flushing. I’ve been spending drinking water for washing and not using the toilet at all for well over a month now and it’s getting a little old.
“…not using the toilet at all…”
That’s GOT to be painful after a month or so…
🙂