Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Dihydrogen Monooxide
Water.
It’s a vital part of life. It’s a key ingredient to a modern lifestyle. Without water, we’d die. But worse than that, we’d die smelly and without indoor plumbing.
We had a housewarming party a while back. Many friends arrived, food was consumed, and drinks quenched much thirst. The aged plumbing in the new house took the abuse. Everything went well.
Until the next morning.
We were out of water, incapable of toilet flushes, showers, or even a glass to drink. We knew this was a possiblity, after all, our spring only was producing 15 gallons an hour, and the cistern is only 200 gallons big.
With regret, we cancelled everyone’s showers, asked them not to use the bathroom at all. They oblidged, and we were resigned to letting the cistern refill at its slow rate.
later that evening (8 hours later) a load of laundry was attempted after the pump had been reprimed. That load never finished. Curious, I went to the spring to see what our current flow rate was, gallon jub and watch in hand. Somehow, between inspection and move in, our spring had gone from 15 gallons an hour to about 6.
We resigned ourselves to showering at the apartment we were still paying for, and calling in a professional. Before making that call, I spent the week discerning where the actual water source is. I was fairly disgusted with what I found. Over the years, the previous owners had “insulated” the hillside where the spring is. Insulated with tar paper, piles of shingles, rotting wood, rusting tin. The smell was bad, the ground was heavily saturated with water. I uncovered the springbox, which was right over what turned out to be the actual spring. There was a pool of water, with some rotted wooden walls and a metal pipe. The metal pipe was completely plugged and rusted.
A few days of cleanup later, I had a clear water source running down the hill. Wanting desperately to take a shower in my own house again, I rigged up a garden hose, using the clay soil, to gravity feed down to the cistern. Amazingly, the hose was producing 15 gallons an hour (back to the original amount) AND we had water flowing over the top of my makeshift collector. Heartened by the gain of water in the house again (after a day of filling and agonizing work of getting it reprimed from the bone dry state the pipes were in), I began to look online for water collection devices.
Hours and pages later, I decided I could build something worthwhile. A trip to Home depot, and a few hours of gluing and we had the water collection unit built. The next morning, we installed it, and trenched out a home for the new PVC pipe. We’re now getting 25 or so gallons of water an hour, so life, and cleanliness can once again occur!
