Water Water Everywhere, somehow we still have some to drink
Every spring we have a big melt. Around here this means that about a foot of snow still left on the ground meets a two day downpour and all melts at once. Since we're on the side of a mountain with a heavy clay soil, the water table comes right up to the surface and sits there for a while.
We have a subsurface well-house. It goes about 5 feet into the ground and is about six by six feet. In this house is the well itself, a pressure tank, and a sump pump for when the well house takes on too much water.
Can you see where this is going?
The sump pump ends up rapidly cycling all year long because every time it rains the well house gets water in it. So last fall I borrowed a tractor and dug a trench and made a daylight drain. (A pipe in the floor of the well house that is just shy of level so the water can drain with gravity.) This drain, operating correctly, would funnel any water away before the level raised to that of the sump pump, preventing the sump pump from having to do any work. I tested it by letting a hose run into the well house floor and verifying that the water went into the drain and came out the other end.
Skip to today, where we started in on a spring rainstorm that'll last all weekend, complete with a flood warning. There's so much water coming down that our driveway has water covering portions of it as the water tries to drain. (And no, the pipe under the driveway is clear, the water is thundering out the other side, it just can't clear it fast enough.)
Every year during these spring storms, I walk around the key points to inspect them for damage or problems. Not much I can do about the driveway right now, other than keep an eye on it and hope for the best. After I checked the new drainage system by the driveway and found it capturing 100% of the water and funneling it right down into the drain pipe (yay functional drainage system) I made my way up to check on the well. On the way, I checked the bottom of its new daylight drain, which had a notable trickle of water coming out of it, which implied to me that it was working fine. So up I went to look at the well.
Pushing the well cover aside a few inches... Panic. Water is only 3 inches from the top of the well house, which, itself, is only 3 inches above ground level. The water has filled the well house up to ground, and water table, level. Almost five feet of water. Slightly more shoving reveals that the pressure tank has actually floated the 12-18" up to the level of the well house cover, which has stopped it from rising further. I don't shove the cover so far over that it can float past it, though. (Thankfully, the well house cover I added is really heavy, more on that later.)
Weeeeeeellll crappity. This is Bad(tm). Something has failed. Well, everything has failed. Did I break something when I put in the drain? Forget something key? The previous owner and my neighborly friend and I have talked about the floating pressure tank before. The previous owner had to have his pressure tank replaced at least twice because this happened to him, too. When water fills the well house the tank tries to float, pulling on its connections to the well, which sever and allow it to float free. Plus, the well and sump pumps run on 110VAC, so either this water is currently electrified and the well is actively trying to pump more water into this mess or the well is entirely inoperative.
Fortunately, the plug for the sump pump is taped to its exit pipe, so I can pull it up without contacting the possibly electrified water. Oddly, it is free, not plugged into anything. I rush up to the house to grab extension cords, and let 11th_letter and nounsandverbs know that there's a big bad problem with the well, and we don't have drinkable water right now. I pass a cord's plug into someone in the laundry room, the closest point I can plug in to, and drag the other end to the well. Four extension cords later (about 200' total) I reach the well house and plug in the sump pump. A moment later it clicks on and delivers a stream of dirty water out its pipe. Once that starts, I watch it and push the cover over a little more so I can get access to the side with the daylight drain. I see motion in the water, a gurgle of water coming straight up above the well pipe. Looks like we've cracked a pipe, and since there's no pressure the well's pumping more water into the flood. Since this could easily fill the well house as fast as I can pump it, I start scurrying around to all the cottages to try and get power turned off to the well. Oddly, none of the houses seem to have a breaker marked for it. Even shutting all the power off in the cottage which I was led to believe services the well doesn't work make the gurgle go away.
I return to the well after setting up the main house to run through breakers while I watch, but by the time I get back to the well, about 20 minutes after the sump pump has been started, the water has lowered so far that I can see the top of the well and am not seeing the water gurgling as before. So I raise the house on my cellphone and belay the earlier order to run through the breakers, and watch what's in the well house.
After a few minutes, the water is low enough that the sump pump no longer needs to run. The pressure tank has settled back on its blocks, the wires to the well are exposed because the cover floated off, and the breaker box that services the well house has physically fallen off the wall. The well house is still filling with water at about 1" per minute. Without the sump pump running, it would be full again in a matter of an hour. And that gurgling seems to have been some sort of motion induced by the sump pump, three feet to the side and way at the bottom of the well, because I'm not seeing an active leak yet. (The incoming water is through the cracks in the floor and sides of the well house, a perennial problem here.)
Apparently, the following failures happened:
So I climb down into the well house and clean off the pressure gauge. 50psi. (Or so, it was getting dark, I could just tell that the gauge was where it should be.) Normal pressure. I turn on the spigot that feeds the well's hose, climb out of the pit, and turn on the hose outside. Full pressure. The pressure gauge in the pit drops a bit, and then climbs back up when the pump re-pressurizes the system again.
Apparently, the following things, some miraculously, did not fail:
Unfortunately, this all started at around 5pm, right about when dinner would have been started, and did not end until right around 6pm. Because we did not expect to have running potable water, we had to order out dinner. However, a dinner out tab is a small price compared to the plumbing bill we would have faced had the last plumber not done such a good job.
Tomorrow, though, I need to go back outside and look the system over again, fix the daylight drain, and see if there's anything else I can do before everything dries out. Once everything dries out, I'll have to re-mount the power to the wall and see if I should be rewiring the breaker box to include an AFCI. I'll also need to run through the cottage and house breaker boxes and confirm which of them runs the well, and mark it properly, and put a note in the main house's breaker box. And possibly put the AFCI on that breaker. Until I can safely touch the breaker box again, I have to keep the sump pump running on the extension cords. (I should probably buy 200' of heavier gauge cord tomorrow.) Hopefully I can take care of that, and soon.
We have a subsurface well-house. It goes about 5 feet into the ground and is about six by six feet. In this house is the well itself, a pressure tank, and a sump pump for when the well house takes on too much water.
Can you see where this is going?
The sump pump ends up rapidly cycling all year long because every time it rains the well house gets water in it. So last fall I borrowed a tractor and dug a trench and made a daylight drain. (A pipe in the floor of the well house that is just shy of level so the water can drain with gravity.) This drain, operating correctly, would funnel any water away before the level raised to that of the sump pump, preventing the sump pump from having to do any work. I tested it by letting a hose run into the well house floor and verifying that the water went into the drain and came out the other end.
Skip to today, where we started in on a spring rainstorm that'll last all weekend, complete with a flood warning. There's so much water coming down that our driveway has water covering portions of it as the water tries to drain. (And no, the pipe under the driveway is clear, the water is thundering out the other side, it just can't clear it fast enough.)
Every year during these spring storms, I walk around the key points to inspect them for damage or problems. Not much I can do about the driveway right now, other than keep an eye on it and hope for the best. After I checked the new drainage system by the driveway and found it capturing 100% of the water and funneling it right down into the drain pipe (yay functional drainage system) I made my way up to check on the well. On the way, I checked the bottom of its new daylight drain, which had a notable trickle of water coming out of it, which implied to me that it was working fine. So up I went to look at the well.
Pushing the well cover aside a few inches... Panic. Water is only 3 inches from the top of the well house, which, itself, is only 3 inches above ground level. The water has filled the well house up to ground, and water table, level. Almost five feet of water. Slightly more shoving reveals that the pressure tank has actually floated the 12-18" up to the level of the well house cover, which has stopped it from rising further. I don't shove the cover so far over that it can float past it, though. (Thankfully, the well house cover I added is really heavy, more on that later.)
Weeeeeeellll crappity. This is Bad(tm). Something has failed. Well, everything has failed. Did I break something when I put in the drain? Forget something key? The previous owner and my neighborly friend and I have talked about the floating pressure tank before. The previous owner had to have his pressure tank replaced at least twice because this happened to him, too. When water fills the well house the tank tries to float, pulling on its connections to the well, which sever and allow it to float free. Plus, the well and sump pumps run on 110VAC, so either this water is currently electrified and the well is actively trying to pump more water into this mess or the well is entirely inoperative.
Fortunately, the plug for the sump pump is taped to its exit pipe, so I can pull it up without contacting the possibly electrified water. Oddly, it is free, not plugged into anything. I rush up to the house to grab extension cords, and let 11th_letter and nounsandverbs know that there's a big bad problem with the well, and we don't have drinkable water right now. I pass a cord's plug into someone in the laundry room, the closest point I can plug in to, and drag the other end to the well. Four extension cords later (about 200' total) I reach the well house and plug in the sump pump. A moment later it clicks on and delivers a stream of dirty water out its pipe. Once that starts, I watch it and push the cover over a little more so I can get access to the side with the daylight drain. I see motion in the water, a gurgle of water coming straight up above the well pipe. Looks like we've cracked a pipe, and since there's no pressure the well's pumping more water into the flood. Since this could easily fill the well house as fast as I can pump it, I start scurrying around to all the cottages to try and get power turned off to the well. Oddly, none of the houses seem to have a breaker marked for it. Even shutting all the power off in the cottage which I was led to believe services the well doesn't work make the gurgle go away.
I return to the well after setting up the main house to run through breakers while I watch, but by the time I get back to the well, about 20 minutes after the sump pump has been started, the water has lowered so far that I can see the top of the well and am not seeing the water gurgling as before. So I raise the house on my cellphone and belay the earlier order to run through the breakers, and watch what's in the well house.
After a few minutes, the water is low enough that the sump pump no longer needs to run. The pressure tank has settled back on its blocks, the wires to the well are exposed because the cover floated off, and the breaker box that services the well house has physically fallen off the wall. The well house is still filling with water at about 1" per minute. Without the sump pump running, it would be full again in a matter of an hour. And that gurgling seems to have been some sort of motion induced by the sump pump, three feet to the side and way at the bottom of the well, because I'm not seeing an active leak yet. (The incoming water is through the cracks in the floor and sides of the well house, a perennial problem here.)
Apparently, the following failures happened:
- At some point, probably over the winter or as a result of the wet walls in the well house from this storm, the breaker box fell off the wall, knocking loose the plug to the sump pump.
- The daylight drain clogged, probably a result of the massive flow of water moving some of the gravel in the pit into the pipe.
- The water filled the well house.
So I climb down into the well house and clean off the pressure gauge. 50psi. (Or so, it was getting dark, I could just tell that the gauge was where it should be.) Normal pressure. I turn on the spigot that feeds the well's hose, climb out of the pit, and turn on the hose outside. Full pressure. The pressure gauge in the pit drops a bit, and then climbs back up when the pump re-pressurizes the system again.
Apparently, the following things, some miraculously, did not fail:
- The last person to reinstall the pressure tank used flexible hose into the tank and out of the well house. Thus, when it floated, it didn't put enough pressure on the steel pipes to crack them.
- The well cover I added saturated with the water in the atmosphere, even though it was tarped, and became too heavy for the floating pressure tank to move, limiting the tank's range of motion.
- The wiring from the breaker box through the well switch and into the well itself did not become inoperative. I don't know why this happened, but it did. By all rights, the power should have shorted out. The 110VAC did not short out, and the well was still operating the entire time. (This actually is something I might need to remedy, I don't think it is safe for this to be able to short and still run.)
- No pipes cracked, not a drop of leakage occurred, our system is still stable and safe.
Unfortunately, this all started at around 5pm, right about when dinner would have been started, and did not end until right around 6pm. Because we did not expect to have running potable water, we had to order out dinner. However, a dinner out tab is a small price compared to the plumbing bill we would have faced had the last plumber not done such a good job.
Tomorrow, though, I need to go back outside and look the system over again, fix the daylight drain, and see if there's anything else I can do before everything dries out. Once everything dries out, I'll have to re-mount the power to the wall and see if I should be rewiring the breaker box to include an AFCI. I'll also need to run through the cottage and house breaker boxes and confirm which of them runs the well, and mark it properly, and put a note in the main house's breaker box. And possibly put the AFCI on that breaker. Until I can safely touch the breaker box again, I have to keep the sump pump running on the extension cords. (I should probably buy 200' of heavier gauge cord tomorrow.) Hopefully I can take care of that, and soon.