Home, Sweet Home (WAS: "The Big Move")

[Sharkey]

Putting in a well would be the positive solution to this issue, and one that will eventually be necessary to the value of the property, as banks here don't lend money on homes fed by spring water. Having a well drilled is an expensive operation. The cost of a finished and operating well in this are can easily approach $100 per foot of depth, assuming that you actually manage to hit water at all. One friend who has property about 30 miles north of here sunk 6 or 7 dry holes before giving up.

The spring on this property served the previous owners for 35 years, and has been in use nearly a hundred, so it must be fairly reliable. Since it's what I have to work with at the moment, I just need to improve the system sufficiently to keep it operational for the time being.

I spent the entire day working on the water system. The good news is that I found that the poly pipe that leads across the creek had come apart at a fitting on a valve, and required reinstalling. It looked like they had problems with this before, there were two hose clamps on the barb fitting. I cut a new end on the pipe, and installed a piece of narrow aluminum to the outside of the pipe, strapping the pipes on each end of the valve together externally with two additional hose clamps, I doubt that this will be a problem again.

The very good news is that the plumbing on the Housetruck survived the freezing last night. The bad news was that afterwards, I had water, but only about 18 PSI at the house. I decided that a trip to the spring was warranted (again). This time I took along a short shovel and my big heavy digital camera.

At the spring, I again found the collection barrel empty, so I removed the diversion and began running the full output of the spring into the barrel. It took quite a while to fill, so I’m assuming that there is a lot of water being lost somewhere in the plumbing running down the ravine.

While I was waiting for the barrel to fill, I used the shovel to improve the path, working my way back from the spring towards the ATV track. The soil was soft, and in about half an hour, I managed to produce a fairly level foot path where before there were only slight shelves to walk upon. It still needs a lot of work, and it’s not done for the full length, but it’s a lot less scary to travel. That's my sweat shirt hanging from a branch above the path, to put it all in perspective.



Once the barrel was full, I tried removing all of the input from the barrel to watch how fast the level went down to see how much of a leak I’m suffering. Quite a large one, by the rapidity of the loss of water from the barrel.

It was getting pretty late in the day, so I had to give up on my road building efforts and begin the trek down the hill and back to the truck, parked on the road at the base of the ATV track. Here’s a view of the barrel and its supply. The whole thing is cobbled together with scrap metals, old rain gutter pieces, and the rusty old barrel. The green plastic mesh and the window screening were additions of my own, replacing the crumbling metal screen that was doing nothing to cover the open top of the drum. All of this is getting replaced as soon as I can put something better together and find some help carrying it up the mountain.



Back at the house, I now have full pressure again, 45 PSI, and the first few gallons were clean. After my shower this evening, I checked the spin filter and found it clogged with the same old rust particles, so I’m back to where I was a week ago. Whoopee.

I spent a few minutes attempting to follow the poly pipe up the ravine from the road, but only got a few dozen feet in before it disappeared beneath a jumble of rocks and tree trunks from some ancient collapse on the ravine walls. Ultimately, I'll have to follow the pipe all the way up to the spring and find and patch any leaks that are causing the water loss. This is something I'll have to do over the course of several days, it will be a very arduous task indeed.

[Stillphil]

Sharkey,
I'm not trying to sound know-it-all but I have worked on several systems just like yours. That poly pipe has a limited lifespan in those situations. It may be better to just run new pipe and leave the old one where it is rather than futz forever with it. Depends on how far the run is, I guess. I know you have a million things to do, but I don't think you'll be satisfied until you develop the spring properly and reliably. It may mean humping 50 lb. bags. of Sak-crete up there for the springbox. It might not take more than a dozen bags, especially if you have some rock up there you could lay up. You may be able to put the reservoir down closer to the house where you could get equipment to the site. Then a premade concrete tank might be the ticket. It's all slavish labor but it's the nature of the beast. You in the country now, dude. -grin-

Stillphil

[matt]

How about a cistern? You could use the water from the house and bus roofs, as well as from the barn roof if you have one. In most areas, especially with only one person, this should be more than sufficient.

[Sharkey]

A new and much larger pipe is definitely on the list of desirable upgrades. If I wasn't spilling so much water on the way down the hill, I could use the excess to run a small hydro system and offset the cost of electric power here. 2" poly isn't that much more expensive, and is no more trouble to install. Just hacking my way up the ravine is the hard part.

I talked on the phone this morning with the friend who purchased so many dry wells up the coast. His take was that I should be looking to install a settling tank in the form of a horizontal plastic drum. Water from the spring goes in about the middle, the overflow to the holding drum comes out the top and the bottom bung is used to periodically drain the sediment. A second barrel (and third and fourth if I need capacity) is situated vertically downhill from the settling barrel and holds the reserve water for domestic use.

It occurred to me this evening that my sediment problems are probably being worsened by the leaks. Sediment travels down the pipe and what doesn't get ejected at the leaks settles lower in the pipe to be forced towards the house.

Roof water is another consideration. The friend up the coast has very little water coming out of his two springs in the late summer, and has done a lot of research on roof water and cisterns. Accumulating and storing water here at the house has other benefits, like having 1,500 gallons and a high delivery pump available for fire fighting is one. Whatever the source, it won't be hard to build a system that better than the POS that the previous owners of this place had put together.

Tomorrow, I go to the city and I'll begin shopping for materials I'll need to put the poly barrel that I already own in place of the rust bucket up on the hill. That alone will improve the situation a bundle.

[Stillphil]

We used a cistern at one place I lived, collecting water from the roof. We had a lot of trouble keeping the bacteria level down. Had to add a lot of chlorine, which seemed a shame.

Sharkey, if you collected a bucket of water directly out of the spring, would it have sediment floating around in it? Spring water usually comes out really pure. I think something else (maybe in addition to the rusty barrel) is adding to it somewhere.

Stillphil

[Sharkey]

It's a perfect example of counting your blessings instead of your curses.

Last week, I had a few email exchanges with the neighbor across the County road, discussing my water woes. Here's his reply:

Sand filters work good to screen out the bigger stuff. we only clean ours once a week or so. The problem is that there is so much fine sediment in the water that if you use a fine mesh it plugs up in a matter of hours if you are using much water at all in the house. I have 2 filters ,one real coarse screen to pick out the chunks and then the next size up to screen out a little bit of the sediment. Then a multipure in the house for drinking water only. When it starts raining like this we just live with tea colored water and there is always some degree of sediment at any time.

So it looks like a bit of sediment is normal.

Wednesday, the weather was due to change, so I spent the morning putting things away, securing things that would blow around in the wind, and covering the stacks of poles and dimensional lumber that I'm going to cut up for firewood. The rain started about 2 PM, so I switched over to inside tasks until dinner time.

Thursday, I went to the city to pay my land payment, buy plumbing supplies for the spring project, and load the truck with more stuff from my storage locker. It rained pretty much all day in the valley, and the rain gauge indicated that we got an inch here.

Friday, it rained pretty hard all day. I was coming down with a cold (the first in a year and a half), so I slept a bit and tried to organize the garage and hang some fluorescent light fixtures. The wind came up and blew down the porch awning on the housetruck, breaking one of the structural members. Spent some time repairing that damage.

After my shower, I went out to clean the spin filter and found that the water entering from the spring was now the color and texture of chocolate milk, and just beginning to get worse. I shut down the feed to the rest of the filters and pressure tank to keep the crud out of the house plumbing. Running the hose from the non-filtered side of the feed from the spring produced gallons and gallons of the same muck.

Since the water in the second filter was still pretty clear, I had caught it just as the pollution was beginning to enter the system. There were about 20 gallons of pressurized water in the pressure tank, enough to get through the evening, so I left the feed from the spring off and carried on being sick.

Saturday, I considered my options. I first poured a 5 gallon bucket of spring water (mud?) to see how fast the turbidity settled out. Not so fast. After 12 hours, the water was still way beyond my comfort level. In the meantime, I busied myself cutting an access hole into the top of the 55 gallon polyethylene barrel that I had intended to take up to the spring head, and installed a 3/4" bulkhead fitting about 5 gallons up the side from the bottom of the barrel.

It became very apparent as the day wore on that the spring water wasn't going to settle sufficiently, so it was time for a new plan, one that was suggested here:

How about a cistern? You could use the water from the house and bus roofs, as well as from the barn roof if you have one. In most areas, especially with only one person, this should be more than sufficient.

Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner! With all of the water coming out of the sky (1.4" on Friday), water from the roof of the house couldn't possibly be as nasty as what I was seeing come out of the spring. I put the barrel near one end of the house and routed one of the four downspouts into the cutout in the top of the barrel, running the water through four layers of window screen to keep out the cedar leaves. In an hour, the barrel was full of slightly cloudy water, but I could see the bottom of the 55 gallon container.

I dug into the shed where some of the stuff from my move is stored and dragged out the 3/4 HP Jacuzzi deep well jet pump and pressure switch assembly that I had rescued from a burned-down radio station studio in 1993, and had been keeping all these years in the event that I bought property and needed a new/better well pump.

Unfortunately the rotor in the pump was pretty much frozen solid and I had to undertake a most-of-the-afternoon disassembly, cleaning and rebuild. I got it pretty much done just before dark, but was feeling crappy from the fever and let it sit until Sunday. My shower was fast and economical, and I used only 5 PSI of the 45 PSI still in the pressure tank. (I'd been flushing the toilet with buckets of spring water to conserve the clean stuff.)

Last night, the wind blew hard and it rained all night, even harder. I didn't venture out of the Housetruck after going in for the night, the weather was too dramatic. This morning the rain gauge said 3.1" from Saturday at 7 AM to the same time today!

I took lots of naps today, the fever was up to 101, and I felt really crappy. I did have time to finish getting the fittings put on the pump, and about 5 PM, in spite of a strong desire to lay down, I went out and disassembled the feed from the spring and the filter assemblies. I dragged the pump out and placed it under the house eaves and plumbed it into the system. I let about 10 gallons of rain water run to waste testing the system and getting the assorted crud out of the pump body and the salvaged poly pipe from down by the creek that I was using.

The result was an ample bath and about 40 gallons left in the barrel for dish washing and toilet flushing tomorrow morning. Then I'll set up the downspout and refill the barrel. Eventually, there needs to be an automatic fill system, but for now, I'm going to go with manual fill and disconnect so that dirt and sediment off the roof doesn't accumulate when the barrel doesn't need filling.

Drinking water has been fine, I filled the pressure tank on the drinking water filter in the Housetruck in response to the freezing weather, so I've been using spring water from before the mud slide began. Yesterday, I went into town to buy plumbing fittings for the pump and work for the radio station. While I was there, I filled one of my 5 gallon stainless steel soda fountain tanks, the type from the old days when soft drink dispensers used "pre-mix", that is the real deal straight from the factory instead of the watery and tasteless "post-mix" that is so common today (syrup and tap water, with carbon dioxide forced in for bubbly effect, yuck). The water from town has it's own pollutants, (fluoride), but my Multipure carbon block drinking water filter should be able to take that poison out.

Tonight there are high wind warnings posted, as well as flood advisories for the coast range, The weather service is calling for 5 - 10" of rain in the next 24 hours, Things are about to get interesting here. At least I'll have plenty of water!

[matt]

How have things been going this week with the cistern? What is the average annual rainfall in your part of Oregon?

[Sharkey]

Another week, another torrential downpour.

The big load of rain that was supposed to hit was a lot more moderate in this part of the Coast Range, but I hear that they really got flooded to the north of here. We got about 4.6" overnight, bringing the total for 36 hours to about 9". This was enough to make the creek spill it's banks and inundate the driveway, which resulted in all of the gravel getting washed off. Many large tree branches and trunks were deposited in the fields, and there is no trace of the three beaver dams, everything got washed away.

Sometime in that period, the supply from the spring stopped flowing altogether, so now I am dependant upon roof water only until I can make a trip up the hill to see what the problem is. I've been busy, and my health isn't returning as fast as I would like, I'm having a lot of trouble getting the fluids out of my lungs after the infection last week. I don't see a reason to be out in the cold and damp any more than necessary at this point.

The roof water is good so far, it's soft water, and I haven't had to disassemble and clean the filters once yet. The only real problem is that with only 50 gallons of storage, I need to see rain every day to keep the reservoir filled. This weekend, Thomas was staying for a couple of nights while we worked on removing equipment from the SeQuential delivery truck, and we had to make an effort to economize on water usage so that there would be enough for showers and flushing. I need to get more storage, either in the form of additional 55 gallon barrels or a 330 gallon "tote", which I can purchase for about $130 completely reconditioned. The tote is a bit more spendy, but I wouldn't have to dink around with cutting access holes or installing bulkhead fittings, and plumbing multiple barrels together. It's 330 gallons all at once, mounted on a standard 30x48" pallet, portable and ready to go with a 2" ball valve already installed.

Annual rainfall here is in the 100-120" range, it can vary depending on elevation and what the surrounding topography is like. Of course, most of that comes down over the winter months, so I guess I could consider that we've already had about 10-12% of the seasons wetness already. We actually had a couple of half-nice days last week, and it was a relief to see the sun and be outside without rain gear.

Friday, I went into the city to pay my property taxes and some car insurance bills. The County building was closed because of the "legal holiday", Veteran's Day, which would be OK, except that holiday was Saturday. I guess that the public employee's union negotiated the day before the actual holiday as an "off" day because the workers weren't going to be there on the weekend. Whatever... banks were open, so I don't understand.

I picked up Truckingturtle's Ford delivery van and Thomas met me at the storage garage in the afternoon. We crammed almost everything from the garage into the van and set of for home. I wanted to get my big antique overstuffed couch and arm chair into the bus and vacate the garage so I don't have to rent it another for month. Roger's van was just the ticket, I had to have a large, long, enclosed vehicle to get the 8' couch home. Thomas and I put it in the Crown, along with my chest of drawers, bookshelf, linen chest and the rest. The inside of the bus is looking busy, but it makes a cozy guest house and I now can get access to my stuff as well. The home theatre equipment makes viewing videos possible, so I'll have some entertainment in the long dark winter days to come. Last night we watched Heavenly Creatures, which stared Kate Winslet and was directed by Peter Jackson. It was a disturbingly bizarre movie based on a true story. Two hours and they didn’t wreck a single car or blow up any buildings.

Tonight, the weather service is calling for storm force winds, possibly 80 MPH on the beaches. The coastal range mountains are subject to 60 MPH gusts. It's all supposed to get nasty at 7PM, but it's 6:45 now and I don't see any wind at all, which is fine with me.

At any rate, hoping to get my health back and get some things done around here. I have to return to the city tomorrow to return Roger’s van and go pay those property taxes. Maybe I’ll get lucky and get to stay home the rest of the week…