| Steve & Susan 2005-06-01, 9:03 am |
| On Tue, 31 May 2005 20:19:51 -0600, Sylvan Butler
<ZsdbUse1+noZs_0505@Zbigfoot.Zcom.invalid> wrote:
>Sure. But if you share the well with someone, that other someone might
>get a bit upset... Or if you have someone coming over to take care of
>your animals, they might appreciate water.
Good point. I have poultry and water fowl and do have someone coming
over to feed/ water them while we're out.
>I usually turn off the water to the house, but leave the well on so the
>barn still has water. That wouldn't have helped me last week though...
>
>Last wednesday at 3am I woke to water pouring in thru the basement wall.
>Leak in the main line right outside the basement. Only solution was
>turning off the pump.
Before I put that main shut-off in that was the only thing I could do,
too. The well owner is an absentee landlord of a rental property and
the tenant did not have the keys - I had to take the door off the
hinges with a "halligan tool" to get in there.
I came to find out that my line froze up before I bought the house and
it wasn't a straight run but a "T" off the neighbor's house 400 feet
away. There was no way to shut off my water without shutting off
EVERYTHING.
>Still trying to figure out how I could be prepared for something like
>that...
I'm not sure if there is any other way, unless there is an adaptive
water flow regulator that can shut off the flow with unusual
resistance.
>I did have a water alarm which meant I only had an inch or two
>of water down there. And luckily I have neighbors so I was able to run
>a garden hose between my washer inlet and their nearest spigot to keep
>the showers and toilets going. I'm thinking some valves and attachment
>point at the well so I could isolate the well from the house (and the
>pressure tanks) would give me a way to access water if there was a main
>line leak like that again.
>
>(Side note... well folk and plumbers wanted to replace my main line.
>Minimum bid was $4000 for a backhoe-dug trench, high bid was well over
>$6000
Geez! You could have had a whole new well bored in some areas for that
much money!
>for directional boring with only three 4x4x4 foot holes in the
>lawn. I decided I could do a lot of digging for $4000, but I had to
>have my own water ASAP. So I spent saturday digging in the crawlspace
>of an adjoining addition that had also flooded. 9pm that night all was
>back to normal and I got change back from the $10 I used to buy parts.)
This is one of my homeowner nightmares: Having the Monroe Bros. from
Green Acres come out to do emergency work for me and bill me enough to
make the balloon payment on their house.
This area has been urbanizing very rapidly and I've had varying
luck... I fired the old propane company because of the smug s.o.b.
that was assigned my route. Prior to being bought up by a larger
utility cooperative, the company was owned by a farm coop and had very
good service. Thankfully we had a family-owned company further west
(more toward a rural area) that has demonstrated it will go the extra
mile for us. Not only did these guys stock a propane hot water heater
when mine sprung a leak, but they came over, installed it the next
day, charged less than the Loews/ Home Depot and got me a rebate from
the propane industry. Still an unanticipated cost, but significantly
not as bad as it could have been (with rebate, about $400 - $200 below
the megastores - with next day service). I was able to bump up the
size from a 30 gal. to a 50 gal. tank. With all of the laundry and
people taking showers in a household of 6, we were always running out
of hot water. The upgrade is pretty much what we need. Seems the
contractors and services from the urbanized areas have developed a
'drop dead' business philosophy. As The Donald would say, "you're
fired!"
I get the impression you like doing that stuff. I'm good at
electronics and lower-voltage electrical stuff; I'm not very "handy"
in other respects. I wish I didn't have to (and actually had
expectations that by this point in my life I could afford to hire
someone to 'do it right'), but I'm usually stuck killing off a weekend
hand-trenching in response to some when-hillbilly-homes-go-bad
emergency.
I'll tell ya what - if I had it all to do over again, I would have
just rented and not bought anything.
Steve
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