Success!

Last we saw, we were left with a broken one of these

and the guys had gone off on a search of a new one.

So here's the story.

This contraption is called a two pipe deep well jet kit.

The shiny silver part screws off and then it all looks like this

And this is what is inside that shiny silver thing:

Looks boring, yes?  Turns out that disc-thing in the middle is very important.  I'm not sure exactly what happens, but I'm assured that this disc-thing forms a tight seal to keep water in the pipes.  When the well pump turns on in the house, it generates negative pressure inside the pipes, which pulls the disc-thing up, breaks the seal, and more water is sucked into the pipes.  

When we took our shiny silver thing all the way apart (which you are not supposed to be able to do), it looked like this:

Okay, so first it comes apart, which it is not supposed to do, and then the pieces inside are broken!  The two smaller pieces are supposed to be stuck together, something like this:

But because ours was broken, it sat inside the shiny silver part like this:

Hmm.  No seal, so the water doesn't stay inside the pipes.  No water in the pipes means nothing to pull against, and the pump can't generate that negative pressure it needs to pull more water in.  So no water for me.  All because of a stinkin' brass shiny thing!

The guys put the new two pipe deep well jet pump back on our pipes, and repeated yesterday's action to put the pipes back in the well (lower the first set, put a new join between the deepest section and the next, hold in the air to dry for 10 minutes, lower the longer pipes into the well, put on a new join...  you get the picture).  This got finished around 8:30pm on Tuesday night.  Then we had to wait for two hours before we could start trying to prime the pump.  Something about drying glue...

So at 10:30pm Tuesday we headed to the basement armed with a few 5-gallon buckets of water.  We had 90 feet of pipe in the well and about 30 feet of pipe between the well and the well pump.  Did I mention this is a two pipe well?  So really there was twice that amount of pipe.  All full of air.  Sort of feels like we are back at the start, yes?

We opened the prime valve and off we went...  dumped a bunch of water in the pipes, got splashed as air came bubbling out, turned on the pump and crossed our fingers!  Almost immediately, we were greeted with this on the pressure gauge:

Okay, so 15 psi is way better than 0 psi, but it's not as good as 60 psi!  We stayed down here for an hour, priming and filling and waiting and filling and priming.  We played with valves, we dumped water all over the floor.

And finally...

At 11:30 pm Tuesday night...

Hooray!  We have water!  And water pressure!

I ran upstairs, bounced down the hall, and flushed the toilet.  Just because I could.  I never thought a flushing toilet would be my favorite sound.  But it is.

Oh, is it ever.

Part 1:  The well, teaser
Part 2:  Finding the well, witching water
Part 3:  Finding the well, for real this time
Part 4:  Down in the well...  90 feet down, to be exact
Part 5:  Whee!  Water again!  Success!

90 feet of pipe

We got very little accomplished on the well project on Monday.  The friends who have the equipment for well pipe extraction are farmers, and are behind in their farming.  John took most of Monday off work to help them get caught up on their farming projects, so they could come help us on Tuesday.

Hello?  Remember me?  I'm your well!  I've been torturing you for days with no water!  Ha ha!

But, never fear!  Roy to the rescue!  Roy brought his big backhoe over on Tuesday morning, and then the fun really started...

Roy also brought Cecil, who cracks me up.  It was entertaining, if nothing else.

The guys are hatching a plan...  This makes me nervous...

They maneuvered the backhoe into position over our well, and lifted this giant steel A-frame high up into the air.  They attached two pulleys to the tip of the A-frame, and this is what they will use to pull the pipes out of the well.

John jumped down in the hole, and tied the ropes from the first pulley to the pipes.

Then he cut the line that goes into the house...

...and made a big mess.

Cecil is helping make sure everything is set up right...

...and off we go!

And up...

And up...

So here's the trick.  We only have about 20 feet of clearance between the top of the well and the top of the A-frame.  Twenty feet into the pipe-lifting extravaganza, there was no end in sight.  So John tied the second pulley (good thing it was there!) to the pipe just above the well, and cut the pipe just above the knots (so the pipes didn't fall down into the well, never to be seen again).  Roy took the first 20 feet of pipe over to the lawn, and I pulled up the second set.  Repeat as needed.

Here are 80 of the 90 feet of pipe that was in the well.  Now it is on the lawn.

(By the way, the car in the picture is for sale.  Her name is Janice.  Anyone interested?  We'll cut you a good deal!)

Ninety feet down in the well, we found this.  This is the broken part.  I don't know what it is called, other than "that damn broken thing!"  I'm not even exactly sure what this piece is supposed to do, but I do know that it wasn't doing its job.  At all.  And it made me grumpy.

Then Cecil went home, and Roy and John went on an adventure to try to find another one of these thingies.  It took hours.

Just look at this 97-foot deep well.  It looks so innocent.  You can even see the water glinting up from its depths.  It is taunting me.

Part 1:  The well, teaser
Part 2:  Finding the well, witching water
Part 3:  Finding the well, for real this time
Part 4:  Down in the well...  90 feet down, to be exact
Part 5:  Whee!  Water again!  Success!

Finding the well

11:15 am Sunday


Sunday morning, John's Uncle Paul came over to help us dig.  So we tried again, and dug a new hole.  Two shovels are better than one!  We picked this spot by running a wire through the pipes from the inside of the house.  The wire hit a "wall," and we marked this spot on the wire.  Took the wire outside, measured from the back of the house straight out into the backyard, and started digging.  Again.



The ground was ridiculously hard, so John busted out the almost-brand-new pick for the project.



The hole got pretty deep, so they switched to a post-hole digger to help with the job.




1:30 pm Sunday

Huh.  This hole looks deep.  And empty.  No well here...




4:15 pm Sunday

By this time, Paul had to leave for work.  John's cousin Sexy Sam and our friend Derek came to help.  That's John and Sam digging.  Derek is drinking a beer.


7:40 pm Sunday

Since we had no luck yet, we went back to re-measure the wire in the line.



While John was playing with the wire, Sam and Derek realized that they could hear the wire rattling in the pipes.



Apparently, the farther underground your head, the better the sound.




8:50 pm Sunday

A bit later, Paul came back, with his trusty locator.  This snazzy device is made for finding things that don't want to be found.  (Why didn't we get this earlier?)  You stick a wire through the end of the pipe you can find.  (Check.)  Then you run a current through the wire.  Above ground, you wave this yellow contraption around, and it beeps when it locates the current.  The beeping changes volume and pitch based on where it is in relation to the current.




8:55 pm Sunday


With a combination of high-tech locating, and low-tech rattling, the guys picked another spot.  And dug into the night.



Wait!  What's that?!  At the bottom of the hole!?  Is that the well?!

Yay!  It is the well!  Well, almost, anyway.  There's part of a bucket turned upside down over the well.



And now, at 9:26 pm central time, Sunday night, I would like to introduce you to...   Our well!



Hmmm.  Now that we've found it, I wonder what's wrong with it?

Part 1:  The well, teaser
Part 2:  Finding the well, witching water
Part 3:  Finding the well, for real this time
Part 4:  Down in the well...  90 feet down, to be exact
Part 5:  Whee!  Water again!  Success!

Witchin' water

As I mentioned in my last post, we're having some problems with the well.  Again.  We replaced the bladder tank for the well pump in January, and we replaced the pump in March.  Only fitting that in June we should have to replace another piece of it, yes?

Friday afternoon, around 4:00, I noticed that we had no water.  So I checked the pump.  Pressure = 0 psi.



That's a bad sign.

I learned last weekend how to prime the pump, so I tried that.  No luck.  Why would it be so easy?  So I unplugged the pump to let it cool off and rest for a while and tried to prime it again.  Still, no luck.  The pump is fine, the lines in the house are fine, there's no leaks anywhere inside or outside that we can find.

We deduce that the problem must be in the well.

Now we have a bigger problem.  Where is the well?

Most of the time, wells have some type of PVC cap that extends about a foot above ground.  All the important lines are buried underground.  Not so for us.  Here, on top of our hill, everything is underground.  There is no above-ground well cap.  There are no markers.  We've talked to people who used to live here before, and all they can tell us is, "It's out behind the kitchen somewhere."

That is remarkably unhelpful.

We spent Friday night borrowing a 1000-gallon water tank, rinsing the fertilizer residue out, and filling it up so at least the cows would have water.  (Gee, this feels familiar...  almost like we've done this before...)  They are watered.  They are happy.  Yay cows.

So on Saturday afternoon, after the Princeton Veterinary Hospital open house, we started trying to find the well.  Apparently, some people have the ability to "witch" water.  You start with two large wires, bent at 90 degree angles, and hold them loosely in your hands so the long ends of the wires are pointing away from you.  Please allow my husband to demonstrate.



Then, you slowly walk forward, perpendicular to where you think the water should be.  As you walk closer to the water (if you have the talent), the wires will start to twist on their own power, until the long ends are crossed in front of you, like so.



John has the witching ability.  I tried it too.  Apparently, I can also witch.  (That may be no surprise to many of you.)

Based on the witching, we thought the well should be here.



We made the scuff mark in the grass ourselves.  Nothing so simple as "splotch marks the spot" here!  This is in the backyard, about 50 feet away from the house, in a straight line from where the pipes enter the basement.  So we dug.



Then John changed into more suitable clothes and dug some more.



Then we got out the probe to see if we could find something hard under all this dirt.



But the ground was too hard to use the probe, so we dug some more.



Then the hole got really deep, and John had to sit down to keep on digging.  After all, this is where the witching said the well should be!



And after all this, what did we find at the bottom of our 3-1/2 foot deep hole?  No well.  So much for witching.  We did find a section of corrugated pipe coming from we're not sure going to we don't know.  It is not the kind of thing that would be attached to a well, so we ignored it.  And it is not going in the direction that we witched water, either.

We left this hole in the ground as a reminder of where the well is not, and we gave up for the night.  We ordered pizza (can't expect me to cook if there's no water, can you?) and went to bed.

We tried again on Sunday.  But that's a story for another day.

Part 1:  The well, teaser
Part 2:  Finding the well, witching water
Part 3:  Finding the well, for real this time
Part 4:  Down in the well...  90 feet down, to be exact
Part 5:  Whee!  Water again!  Success!

Tuesday teaser

At 4:00 pm on Friday, the pressure gauge on our well pump looked like this:



(That dial should be sitting around 60, not at 0.)

At 4:15 pm on Sunday, our backyard looked like this:



At 8:45 pm on Sunday, Sexy Sam looked like this:



And at 2:15 pm on Monday, our well pump pressure gauge still looks like this:



You want to know the whole story, don't you?  You're just dying to hear how it ends, aren't you?

So am I!  Stay tuned!

Part 1:  The well, teaser
Part 2:  Finding the well, witching water
Part 3:  Finding the well, for real this time
Part 4:  Down in the well...  90 feet down, to be exact
Part 5:  Whee!  Water again!  Success!