You never miss the water...

 

It's been a hard day. The sun has gone down and I'm enjoying a long hot shower after a full day in the shop.  Reluctantly, I reach to turn off the water when that suddenly becomes unnecessary. The water stops all by itself.

That cannot be good.

If you live in the city, you take for granted that when you turn on the tap, water comes out. But when you live on a well, you don't take that for granted. First thing I did when I bought this property was drill a well.  Without water, it's game over.

My first thought was that there must be an electrical problem.  It takes two pumps, two tanks, a lot of pipe, and an aquifer 350 feet down in the ground to get water to my shower.  

There are three circuit breakers between the groundwater and me, so I get dressed, grab a flashlight and head outside to check. There's one breaker on the back porch, one at the pump house, and a third one out on the well head itself.

None of the breakers are blown.

This cannot be good.

Nothing to do tonight but put on the jammies and go to bed.  In the morning, one of two things will happen.  If there's water in the storage tank, I need to call the pump guy.  If there's no water in the tank, I need to call the well guy.

Either way, I'm gonna need to call my banker...

As I'm about to climb into bed, another thought hits me.  There is another part of this system I  had forgotten about.  I had installed a timer to control when the well pump comes on.  The pump down in the ground comes on when a float in the tank tells it we're about 500 gallons down (out of 5000), and when the float gets down that low, it turns on the well pump.

Because I can't take electricity for granted out here either, I want the well pump to run only at predictable times,  because it draws a lot of power and it runs for an hour.

So I put on a coat over the PJs and get out the flashlight again.

Sure enough, the dial on this digital timer was blank. I don't know why, but it had shut itself off.  

I flipped the switch to "Manual" and immediately heard the lovely sound of water splashing into the tank from far under the soil of Sábado.

I don't know how many hours the well pump ran that night to refill the tank, but it used up all my battery reserve.  That wasn't a problem, because as soon as the sun comes up, the sky goes to work on my solar panels and gives me the gift of power, so by the afternoon of the next day my batteries were full, and so was my water tank.

Normally, I feel the tank to check the water level.  

The metal is cold until my hand gets up to the water level, and from there up, the metal is warm from the sun.  But I had neglected to do this check for several days.

Never take things for granted in the country...

Today, I rigged up a device that will keep me informed of the water situation by sight.

I drilled a hole in the tank's manhole cover, and inserted some fittings that will allow a rod to slide up and down freely. To the bottom end of the rod I attached a copper toilet float, and to the top, a bright yellow rubber ball.

Now I can see at a glance, even from the house, how high the water is.

Hopefully I won't be having my shower water dry up suddenly any more.  Next time I could have shampoo on my head and soap in my eyes!