Saturday September 7 2013 Guerneville CA.
It seemed like a good idea to work on the water spring today
There’s five houses on our spring water system and the tanks have been more on the empty side for the last couple days. Seems some people just don’t know how to conserve water so I decided I better do something about getting more water into our water tanks.
Of course, I’m guilty of not doing much maintenance on the water system. As long as there is plenty of water, there’s not much to do. However, toward the end of the summer the springs don’t put out as much water so when there is something wrong, it really shows up at this time, which it did.
Below our main spring, which is an old Indian spring, there was about three quarters of a gallon of water coming out of the hill and just going on down the hill, so I decided I better get this water into our water system, which meant putting in a spring tap, which meant a lot of work. I had dug it out a bit last night, so today I took a slitted piece of half inch pipe up and put a small dam in to catch the water and get it into the pipe.
The old pipe to the right is not used and is from an old tap. The little slitted pipe on the left is the one I installed and dammed up to catch the water. I installed a square stainless steel screen box over the pipe, than covered that with rocks to let the water travel into the pipe.
Around noon I went on back home to get some more supplies to do the job. Good time to get something to eat and a little nap time too. Around two PM, I went on back up there to work on it some more, although my body was protesting.
I rocked it and covered the spring area with plastic bags.
You can see some of the rock just below the last plastic sack I turned back so you can see it.
The plastic bags help seal the spring up to keep bad thing out of it. I then covered the plastic with some dirt and rocks to help seal it up some more.
This if the view of it all covered up with earth to help seal it all up and protect it from critters and bugs.
That about wore me out, but I still had more to do.
The air vent just below that spring was leaking water as it was pinched off a bit by the tree growing around the old pipe. I started to cut the tree to get the old pipe out, when I realized that part of the tree was what was holding the water pipe up in the tree, so I stopped cutting and put in a new tee and one way valve and pipe extension. The one way valve is to let air in and not let water out. In the winter the pipe flows big time with water and without the one way valve it would blow a lot of it out the vent.
The new air vent I installed on the redwood tree, just below the new spring tap.
By now, I was really pooped, but still had more to do. I went on up the hill some more to another old spring I had tapped a long time ago, but the wild pigs had taken over and disconnected the pipe, which I had to dig up in the water hole, clean out with water and reconnect.
This is the other spring area the wild pigs had messed up with their wallow, which they aren’t using at the moment.
This spring has a good tap as you can see below. The tap pipe is in the side of the hill and rocked in, so animals and bugs can’t get into it easily. The wild pig’s water hole should dry up now.
That done, I was even more worn out now, but I still had one more thing to do and that was check the main water line down the hill for leaks. Sometimes animals bite holes in the pipe trying to get the water so I had to check it out. That line goes straight down the hill about a thousand feet though the brush and trees which isn’t easy to walk. I only found one small leak which I taped up with black electrical tape.
I was ready to go on home, but I remembered I hadn’t checked out the other water line from the pig wallow spring I had just fixed so I had to check that out too, another walk straight down the hill and then back up to get my four wheeler. This line was pulled apart at a joint, so I put it back together and taped it up to keep it from coming apart again. By this time, I could hardly move without much body pain and barely made it back up the hill to my four wheeler, a painful hike up the hill, straight up.
My arm muscle that I had pulled the night before was mostly working ok, as long as I didn’t’ try to push or pull anything too hard, which surprised me as it hurt like heck last night and this morning, so I guess that will heal ok, maybe working it hard was the thing to do, we’ll see.
I’m home and found that the other houses hadn’t used up all the water today, so I was able to get a hot shower and am now taking it easy, with a sore body that is complaining a bit, but I’ll mend and survive, I think. :O)
Although it was a lot of work, I got more exercise than I wanted which is still good for me, I think. :O) I also put an extra 13 hundred gallons of water into the tank in twenty four hours, which should be real helpful.
Had a nice day working in the forest and I have some more free water to boot, not bad.