WELL HELL

Warning: The following is a tedious uninteresting blog.
it was just one of those lumps of lava that had to work its way to the vent so I don't pull out whats left of my hair this weekend. read at your own risk, just be aware it will be 7 minutes of your life you will never recoup. Feel free to eject here.


I knew it would happen some day.
I just wish I would have had some warning.

Friday:
I went into our home office / laundry room / mechanical room and I heard the noise.
Jojo was still in Ohio so I shouldn't hear that noise now.

The submersible well pump was running and running and running. The first thing I did was check to see if a toilet was running, simple problem, simple fix


Nope, no jiggle of the flush lever was going to fix this.

Panic started to set in, over the past several months I have been on several calls where the customer was thinking they had a problem with their water heater or their water softener only to have me tell them they had a water leak somewhere under their concrete slab. Bad news for them, I would leave there thinking that's too bad, but better them then me. And then the thought would hit me, I have 2 homes that are on a slab, which means my odds of that happening to me are double.

I dropped to my knees and started praying while turning off the main valve. Hmmm, pump is still running and no water going to the house plumbing. Could it be a stuck pressure switch? I pulled the contacts back and watched the gage drop from 40 psi down to 15 in nothing flat. Oh hell! Not good. That means I have a leak between here and the well, or the pipe that runs down the well casing, or the pump itself has an issue.
The house was built in 63, but the pump was replaced 20 years ago.
City water is available, but quite expensive to hookup to. We have talked about running city water in and the tipping point has been if the worst-case scenario occurred and we had to drill a new well.
This is not the case here, we have plenty of water in our aquifier. The well guy is coming out tomorrow and will do it on the cheap if he doesn't have to pay a helper. So I will assist him and save some dough.

We are in semi-Amish mode with our water supply and we have to flip the breaker to the pump when we don't need to draw water. We can get water in the house with limited pressure. Luckily I had the 55-gallon water transfer barrel setting high in the garage. We use this barrel to transfer water to our little fishing cabin in Nashville IN.
I keep the transfer barrel in the garage and periodically I put it in the back of the Jimmy, fill it with good ol softened H2O and take it to the lake. I have an identical barrel in the loft of the fishing cabin/shed and I pump it into the supply barrel where it lasts thru many outside showers and sink use for several weeks.

It never occurred to me that this system could serve in a pinch at the homestead till now. I filled it up and felt a little better in knowing that if the well gives up completly we will have enough water to get by. 

Saturday:

So tomorrow is here and I'm waiting on my well guy to save the day. Will let you know how it goes.  

 10:09 AM

So it begins, James the well guy arrives with no fancy equipment, no expensive tools, just a lot of know how.
He was sure the leak was in the line going down to the pump.

He unlocked the device that locks in the horseshoe fitting into the lateral connection and we started the pull. That's when James said, " it's galvanized steel pipe". Arrrrg this is going to be heavy!  The procedure was to pull like hell till you have about 6 to 10 feet of pipe sticking out, then you use a clamping tool to keep the pipe from falling back down the well (if that happens your royally screwed). Then you cut off that section of the pipe, which makes the next pull a little lighter, that is until the pump gets wedged in the well casing due to the years of rust and debris buildup.

I'm glad I didn't try this myself, my first instinct when the pump got stuck was to pull harder. Wrong thing to do, that's how people get their pumps wedged and end up killing their well casing.

We just worked the pump up and down several times and with a little sweat the pump would free itself.

After 73 feet of pipe was extracted and cut off and several bouts of the pump getting stuck and massaged out we got to the pump and just above the pump was a hole in the pipe big enough to stick a number 2 pencil in.
Eureka! Now I knew this was where the problem was.

The pump and the wires could have been reused, but I figured after 20 years of service I would retire both.
We used poly pipe instead of iron and putting the new pump in was a breeze.

Sunday:
Had to shock the well with bleach yesterday, so we are still semi-amish with the water situation.
A case of drinking water and 45 gallons left in the transfer barrel has us in good shape while the well is flushed out most of the day.
Sitting here drinking my Sunday morning coffee watching clips of IU's great win last night I'm at ease with the well situation now.
It's nice to have that worry of  "when is the well pump going to die?" behind me.
Now all I have is the "when is a water pipe under the concrete slab going to break?”

It's always something.

Epilogue:

This demonstration was for entertainment purposes only. Unless you have pulled a submersible pump under the tutelage of a qualified well man at some point in your life,

DO NOT TRY THIS AT YOUR HOME!

If James hadn’t been able to make it on Saturday, I had threatened to try this myself. 

Afterwards I saw many times where I would have made the wrong decision and screwed the pooch.

James and me were settling up the bill in the garage and drinking a well deserved cold Coors Lite and James gets a call from another customer who wanted him out there today!

My well pump replacement had taken longer than expected and James had family obligations so he could not make the customers timeframe.

The guy was going to try it himself.

James just looked at me and shook his head.

I nodded in affirmation.

Words were not needed.

As Dirty Harry once said: “A mans got to know his limitations”.