Hello Everyone!
A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.
TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.
The Fantastica Chronicles Day 408!
More Water System Troubleshooting, Tinkering With Blender & Expanding The Rain Harvesting System
I awoke having gotten very little sleep and fortunately the rain paused just long enough for me to brew some espresso or else I would have more than likely gone right back to bed. Ultimately falling asleep again would not have been all that big of a deal or anything but I had told the folks at the homestead proper that I would come down early in the morning to finish looking at the failed well water system there. Having spent the night before staying up late and researching well water system troubleshooting (like I mentioned in yesterday's post) I was feeling pretty damn 'rough around the edges' but ultimately I felt that it was time well spent and woke up with all that stuff running through my mind and did not even bother finishing my espresso before hiking to the homestead proper, meeting up with the folks there and diving back into the diagnosis process.
As far as the well water system goes I think that we eliminated pretty much everything from the equation aside from either the buried wires between the pump and the pressure tank switch being damaged or the water line between the pump and the pressure tank being compromised. Both of those things would require digging up the yard and honestly I do not think they are what is broken. I am not going to spell out all the detailed steps of what we did but it is worth noting that we pulled the cover off the well's head and could see water about twenty feet down in the well so at least the well has not run dry. We also flipped the breaker to the well pump on and off a few times but I could neither hear the submersible pump running (which is iffy on whether I could or not because we do not know the depth of the well) nor could I feel any vibration from the pump running in the vertical pipe inside the metal exterior well casing. One thing that I did notice is that the metal casing pipe is rather rusty and at some point it would probably be a good idea to sleeve the interior of it with PVC pipe as a preventative measure because eventually the metal pipe will rust through and surface water could then potentially seep into the well.
It was afternoon by the time all the well water system troubleshooting was over and we reached the conclusion that what probably happened was that the pressure tank had slowly gone bad and that in turn lead to the water pump 'rapid cycling' and failing because like I said yesterday the pump is probably two or three decades old and burned itself out trying to maintain the necessary water pressure. One thing worth noting is that the electric bill at the homestead proper has been higher than normal the last few months and there is a pretty good chance that it was the pump running so often that caused it. I guess that once the water system gets repaired we will know one way or another if that was what was happening with the electric bill. On the bright side to all of that if the well pump does wind up needing to be replaced it will undoubtedly be a much more efficient model because overall motors (and pumps in general) have become a bit more efficient in the last few decades.
Anyway, it was late in the afternoon by the time that I got my daily chores and my daily writing done and by then I was assuredly feeling even more ragged around the edges and sort of just wanted to take a nap but one of my fellow homesteaders wanted to use my high-speed internet and get a little help with installing Blender on a laptop. I had previously walked them through doing so on another laptop and was pleasantly surprised and super proud of them that they remembered how to open a terminal and even recalled from memory the majority of the commands to get the repositories updated as well as installing the software itself. I do not know how it feels for other folks but I clearly remember the visceral/ecstatic feeling that I first felt (and occasionally still do feel) by doing stuff via the terminal instead of relying upon a graphical user interface. Do not get me wrong there because I absolutely love a good GUI (especially for complex things) but when teaching other folks stuff I think that it is important to teach them the terminal first.
It had been a long time since I had tinkered with Blender at all and whoa has that software come a long frigging way! After getting it installed on that laptop I wound up installing it on my own computer and the other person was able to show me a bunch of things (mostly keystroke shortcuts) that they had already learned and between the two of us (and several internet searches) we were able to help them figure out some stuff that had been stumping them recently while they have been learning the software. I have undoubtedly seen a good bit of complex software over the years but I think Blender 'takes the cake' and am so thankful that there is so much documentation for it as well as good demonstration videos. Personally I do not know if I will use it all that much because I already have my hands full doing the computer related stuff that I already do but I do not mind helping that fellow homesteader to learn it and gain some familiarity with it for myself along the way.
Anyway, after all that jazz was done I changed gears and retrieved the water barrel that I had near the creek so that I could expand the storage capacity of my rain water harvesting system. I initially was thinking to just connect the second barrel to the barrel that I already have installed but then decided to just give it its own supply line so that the two 'holding tanks' would be independent of each other. The way that I had the corrugated pipe setup did not really offer a good way to hookup another water line that would be useful in anything aside from heavy rain events so I decided to do an experiment that I have been considering ever since I first set the system up. What I did was insert a one inch PVC pipe at the top of the corrugated pipe, a long piece of three quarter inch irrigation tubing that fills the second barrel and two short pieces of irrigation tubing at the bottom of the corrugated pipe. All total that is five and a quarter inches of output piping and all but the very bottom piece of tubing is screened on the end because I want it as a drain and if need be a way to flush/clean the corrugated pipe.
Once I got all the output pipes in place I used expanding foam to seal the end of the corrugated pipe which just amounted to me carefully squirting the stuff around all the pipes and tubing sleeved inside of it. I know it is hacky as fuck and yeah it will undoubtedly leach a little foam residue into the barrels but for my purposes that is not all that big of a deal. My goal with all that is to just harvest as much water from the system as I possibly can and have an easy way to hookup more water lines to it to fill more holding tanks and/or gravity feed further downhill. I have yet to test just how well my foam seal holds up but the next time there is a heavy rain I am excited to see what happens!
Well, I am just going to wrap this up before I get over-involved and spend my entire morning writing. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Thanks for reading!
More about me: I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.
A little over three years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!
The way that the Fantastica Chronicles came about is that I was living at another place when I started chronicling and sharing my days but eventually I wound up moving to a new place. The new place is a homestead named 'Fantastica' so I started with 'Day 1' upon my arrival here and just kept documenting my days much like I had done for the previous nine hundred and fifty-seven days at the last place that I lived.
I have mostly done that 'documenting' at Fantastica exclusively with words (and pictures) opting not to do the videos because as I learned at the last place, sharing videos over an intermittent and slow internet connection is horribly time consuming and what I often think of as an 'ulcer inducing' experience. All that said, I opted for simplicity with the documentation and have no real regrets for doing so.
The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.
Please check out the Homesteading Community:
created/hive-114308
Hive Survival Guide Sixth Edition can be found here:
@jacobpeacock/hive-survival-guide-sixth-edition
A playlist of my Jacob Goes Off Grid Videos can be found here:
Please consider becoming a patron on my Patreon page!!!
That Is All For Now!
Cheers! & Hive On!