Saturday July 8, 2023 Guerneville CA.
Spring Tapping
I’d installed the outlet pipe for the spring a few days ago and now I needed to finish off the inlet part of the spring where the spring water enters this pipe.
Inlet work
I dug out the inlet so all this collection area sloped towards the green outlet screen. The bottom is mostly rocks and clay dirt and I added a bit more clay to the bottom to help seal things off, although, because there is so much clay already in this hole, the seal is already very good and doesn’t leak any water.
Stainless steel screen
The spring water is flowing into that green gutter down spout pipe screen and now needs the kitchen stainless steel strainer installed on the top of the green screen and pushed into the clay bottom a bit to seal it off.
Screen and rocks
The stainless steel screen is in place with the green screen supporting the middle of the stainless screen to hold it up so the rocks I’m going to add, don’t crush the screen.
Pile of rocks
I’ve been collecting these rocks as I dug out the spring and stock piled them here.
I’m moving this pile of rocks to the spring tap on the left, not far from the pile. The rocks provide cracks for the water to flow through to get to the outlet and prevent critters and things from getting into the spring tap, for a sanitary water tap.
I got all the rocks in. The upper finger goes up to some water coming out of the hill, up that high. The rocks provide a way for the water to get down to the spring outlet pipe.
Sealing it up with chicken feed bags
The next step is to cover it all up with some plastic chicken feed sacks, overlapping them like shingles. Then I started covering the plastic bags up with dirt and rocks to keep the sun off the plastic bags so they last a long time.
All sealed up
It now looks like this, all sealed up and ready to go. It shouldn’t hurt much now if more dirt slides down on top of this.
The reward
The reward is a nice fresh cup of spring water. I haven’t measured the spring output yet, but I will say the water is cold, maybe sixty or so degrees F.
I have a bit of tidying up to do and I’ll be all finished with this spring tap. And then I need to put all the video clips I made of the tapping together for a YouTube Video on spring tapping.
Nice day.
Ingenuity is what I see. We never had to tap a spring since we had a nice creek at the bottom of the hill. Thanks for showing how to do it. You need know when that may come in handy.