Water water

So, when I started this blog, it was with the intent to give a little knowledge about New Zealand, and try to do so in such a way that it was entertaining and fun… I’m afraid I am not keeping up with my intentions, and life is keeping me too busy to continue the blog in this manner, so, I’ve decided to change the blog’s original intent. The new intent will to be to tell about my life and experiences in New Zealand. It will still be with the intent of giving a view of New Zealand and its quirks, but I will not strive so hard to write about “New Zealand” and instead write about day to day life in New Zealand.

The kinds of situations I will write about are things like our water situation. Most of the population of urban New Zealand has water pumped to their houses much like most of the U.S. but the population in more rural areas of New Zealand have to get their water in more creative manners. Many rural New Zealand houses have water tanks sitting in their back yards, with pipes collecting the rain water that falls of their roofs. Often in the dry months of summer, people have to pay to have someone bring them water in a tanker truck.

This has been the situation Samantha has been in most of the time I’ve known her. But when we moved to the Thames house, we found ourselves in a new situation, in some ways improved, in some ways, a bit more of a chore. Here, we still get our drinking water from the roof, but the rest of the water, the water for the shower, laundry, outside taps and horse troughs all are pulled out of a creek on the property. The up side is we never have to pay for water, we always have abundance, the down side is we have a half a mile of hose going from the creek to the house and if something goes wrong; fixing it is a lot of work.

So far this year, a lot has gone wrong… I have learned some valuable lessons. If you see water bubbling out of a hole in the ground, it is probably a bad idea to stick your hand in the hole, grab the pipe at the bottom and pull up… This will lead to hours of digging in the mud, pulling up pipe, and having to wriggle piping until you can get the two pieces that you’ve split back together… Funny enough, the situation I describe is the second time it has happened, the first time was much worse.

Normally, how we discover there is a problem with our water is we go to turn on the outside faucet, and find no water running. The solution is usually pretty easy, a half mile hike up to the filter, a quick cleaning of the filter, a quick bleeding of the hose and we’ve got water again. But on this occasion, I went through all the steps and still, no water. This meant there was some problem between the filter and the house, which meant following the hose across the paddocks until I find a place where the hose has come undone and water pouring onto the ground.

I started at the house and started following the hose up the hill. Most of the hose is above ground, but there are many stretches that are buried under grass and other stretches that are under dirt. As I followed the hose up, I found a joint, and while delicately inspecting the joint to see if maybe it was leaking, I gave it a gentle yank, and the joint came apart. It is a bit of a mystery how this happened because, when I tried to reconnect it, which should have been easy since there was no water flowing, but the two ends wouldn’t reach each other.

I placed the two pieces together hoping I wouldn’t need to tighten the joint and continued to follow the hose until I did find the joint that had caused the problem. It was an easy fix, but now I’d done far more damage where I’d pulled the hose apart below. I got the water running again at the filter, but as I came down the hill to the spot I’d pulled the hose apart, I found water spilling on the ground. Pull as hard as I like, I could not get any more slack out of the hose.

I followed the hose until I found some more slack, then proceeded to start pulling up the hose out of the grass in some spots and out of the ground in others. It was about one hundred meters from where I’d found the slack to where I’d pulled apart the joint. I made my way down the hose, pulling and digging cutting grass and digging and pulling some more. After a couple of hours of work, it was starting to get dark so I packed up and decided to call it a day.

The following day, Samantha had the day off so she came up the hill with me and together we dug out the rest of the hose. It took another couple of hours and finally we pulled the slack to the break. We fixed the split, and had water again. Not the end of the story… The link is still a weak link and we’ve been back up the hill several times to reconnect the joint… It is much easier now that we don’t have to drag a hundred meters of hose out of the dirt, but it is still more work than we’d like to be dealing with.

And then there is the problem with the filter itself. The filter is a piece of PVC pipe, about two feet long with several small slits cut in it to let water in. The slits are small, and it doesn’t take much debris to clog the filter and once again, stop our flow of water… This didn’t happen for the first three months we lived in the house, but then the rain came. Since the rain came it has been several times a week we’ve had to hike up the hill to clean the filter to get our water running again. We’ve become experts at cleaning it, now if we could become experts at keeping it clean, we’d be golden.

While in the States, I did pick up a filter for a swamp cooler, with any luck, this will do the trick, I’ve wrapped the PVC with the swamp filter cooler and so far it has worked brilliantly, I’ve walked back down to the house (a second time, had to go reconnect the hose that won’t stay together), turned on the water, and voila, we have water… It didn’t last a full hour… I may have made it worse.

In the morning I’ll be walking back up the hill to see if I can’t figure out why our water is not flowing and to see if the filter is the problem… I’m sure one day, it will work brilliantly…