Day #3

Today is the third day of having no running water and it SUCKS!  On Sunday, Dan spent ALL day digging  and repairing the water line between the well house and the house.  Sunday night, we thought it was all done and I was running water to clean something - renovation is dirty work let me tell ya!  So I'm cleaning away and all of a sudden the water stops running.  I alerted Dan.  Now it must have been around 8 pm when this happened.  They had just finished filling in the hole where the repaired line was buried.  Dan immediately worried that somehow the weight of 8 feet of earth had crushed the new line - despite the fact that the tubing we bought was specifically for what we were doing.  He didn't really know what to think about this.  The pump was still running, he could hear it.  He spent the next several minutes thinking and checking connections in the basement.  Maybe a line had been shut off.  He and Patrick were stumped.  Dan looked like he was about to cry.  Poor guy.  He had just spent more than 12 hours on this project and now he couldn't figure out what was making the water stop flowing.  Just as he was feeling totally defeated and asked me to take him to Rice to pick up his semi so he could drive it back home to Royalton so he could get a quicker start in the morning, he went to look at the well pump one more time.  He immediately saw the problem.  A hose had blown off the end of the pipe that goes into the tube underground, to the house, so the water was pumping right back into the well house!  When he "checked" the pump before, he had only listened and heard it running, he hadn't gone and looked.  There was probably a foot and a half of water covering the bottom of the well house.  He unplugged the pump and we went and ran our errands to let the water drain away.  When we returned home he was able to reconnect the pipe and hose.  The water had returned.

Then yesterday morning, when Dan got up for work, it was off again.  He woke me up to tell me before he went out to check on it.  This time, the other end of the hose had blown off the pump.  Wonderful!  Dan said he could fix it when he got home from work in the evening and I just had to buck up and prepare to live for another day with no running water.  I had a few jugs filled with water to last the day.  What really sucked was that I needed to do dishes after a weekend filled with running around and working on renovations they were totally piled up.  When Dan got home then he immediately got to work.  He primed the pump and water only trickled out.  "What on earth is going on?" we thought.  The line just would not pressurize!  It was Patrick's birthday and we had plans to go out for dinner, so Dan had to put it to rest.  He was exhausted from the intensity of working on it on Sunday and had no desire to work on it when we returned from supper.  He told me I would have to wait one more day and then he would even consider getting a new pump all together.  The current, non-working, pump was a new pump that he just installed last month.  He is thinking that when the hose came off during the night that by running dry all night it burned it out.  Man, I hope not.  I don't know what it could be, I don't know how the thing really works, I just hope it won't be a costly repair.  So, today is the third day (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday!) that we don't have running water.  I've loaded the dishwasher and tried to neatly stack the rest of the-desperately-needing-to-be-done-dishes.  I don't think I've ever been so disappointed not to do them.

Dan is going to work on it as soon as he gets home tonight.  I'm praying for a good outcome  - and water.