Well, Well, Well...

Maybe You Should Buy Some Gold.

John and I have been quietly stressing out for the past two weeks. Our new well - the one we spent A LOT of money drilling in the spring of 2022, has been gradually failing.

John, being John, has a list of regular checks he performs every Sunday like clockwork. In 2021, he retired after 30 years of performing building maintenance for a large airport. As you might imagine, he was good at it. Darned good.

In 2010 when I went to work for the same airport, I kept hearing his name over and over in various situations:

People said, “Go ask John… John would know.”

Who is this John guy? I wondered. Obviously, I found out and the rest is history.

I still recall, when we started spending time together, I’d overhear him on a phone call from someone at work.

“No, we’re not out of that part. We have a few left. Go down this or that road, in the blue building on the second floor on the top back shelf on the left. I think there are three of those screws in that yadda yadda contraption…”.

While the context of the problem was usually lost on me, I understood that he knew every building inside and out from basement to rooftop and tracked all the moving pieces in his head. For 30 years. I was impressed. In fact, for a complete organizational nerd like me, it was a real turn on.

Fast forward to now and the Sunday checks.

John checks our three cistern water levels weekly so that any issues will be apparent early on - long before we ever run out of water. He checks the propane tank levels to track how much we use every week and he checks the generator hours, too. These checks only take about 20 minutes total, but they’re strong early indicators that would let us know if a part of our system was amiss.

Like the well.

Manifolding the cisterns together.

Water Levels

Our “new well” is located down the hill from our house. The well pump sends water directly to the three cisterns that are in the hill above our house. The cisterns send water, as needed, to the pressure pump in the cellar and from there, water is distributed throughout the house.

All three cisterns are manifolded together. John set the float in the cistern to automatically turn the well pump on when the water level drops below 36”. The pump turns off when the level reaches 41”.

This winter, during his checks, John noticed that the well pump was taking longer than usual to move the amount of water required to reach 41”. Where it had been taking 45 minutes when the well was new, it had gradually slowed to hours and wasn’t even reaching 41” at all.

Something wasn’t right.

BTW, before someone asks, that’s a guidewire from the wind turbine and also a line to the Internet Signal Booster - not power lines. :-)

Our winter was especially cloudy and gray so we used the propane generator a lot more than normal to compensate for the lack of solar power. Running that well pump takes a lot of power so the generator often did the heavy lifting. Given the issues we had with the propane this winter, we decided to shut down the “automatic” float trigger and just turn the well on manually for a few hours at a time until we could figure things out. Doing that cut down on the time the generator had to run to power the well pump over the winter and, meanwhile, it gave us enough water to last us.

We kicked the can down the road as long as we could but, in the meantime, we stressed.

Was the well out of water? Were we going to have to dig up the entire line? Would we need a new pump? How much would it cost? Having the pump pulled is the most expensive part - and could we even get someone to do it? In our worst moments, there may have even been a brief mention of Zillow…

John ran through all the things that could cause trouble. Wells aren’t his specialty but he knows a lot about electricity, plumbing and water pressure. In the end, though, even he was befuddled… so much so that he even came to ME for ideas.

When you’re stumped, often starting from the beginning is the best thing to do. Also, since I have no clue about wells, electricity or water pressure, I did the only thing I knew how to do.

I drew.

I drew a little pencil diagram and asked some very basic questions about how the system works.

This goes here and then what? And then this powers what? I connected my cartoon shapes with arrows as he talked.

I finally asked him whether it could be a grounding issue. We’d run through everything else. He said probably not but agreed to check the grounds anyway. They appeared solid.

We were at a loss.

We have issues with grit in our water, but that’s not new. The grit isn’t terrible and a Brita filter takes care of it but, after much measuring and analysis, John proposed that the grit of the new well could have worn down the well pump’s propellers and ruined the pump. Plausible.

After all, the pump was still running (still drawing power) and the pump saver would have shut the pump off had the well run out of water. Without being able to see the pump (which was down a 600’ hole), that was his best guess: Grit.

Armed with voltage and amperage readings, pressures, timings, and pump model and serial numbers, John called our old friend Chester, the Well Guy. Within days, he came and pulled the pump.

Electrolysis.

If you thought, like I did, that electrolysis was about hair removal… well, you were only half right.

Electrolysis is a chemical reaction that can happen between two dissimilar metals when exposed to electrical current. The word “lysis” means to separate or breakdown and this is what it looks like:

That’s our well pump and, do you see that hole? That hole is the effect of electrolysis.

The pump is steel and the pipe above it is galvanized. Those red and green wires conduct direct current that produced a chemical reaction that ate a hole in our pipe.

The hole caused the pipe to lose pressure which meant the pump didn’t have the power to push water 50’ up our hill to the cisterns. It was running - it was trying - and the water was there, but no pressure because of the hole.

Because of electrolysis.

Digging a trench to bury the water and power lines to the cisterns in 2022.

Well that explains it.

Finally, after months of fretting, we could breathe.

Chester said he’d never seen electrolysis happen in new wells. He’d only seen it happen in wells that were at least 15 years old and even so, only a few times.

Well, aren’t we special?

Chester fixed it by changing out the galvanized pipe with a PVC pipe to connect the hanging pipe to the pump. He also installed a better ground on the well cap than was there previously… because guess what else can prevent electrolysis?

Good grounding.

So I guess I was on to something, after all… I have to take my little “mechanical - electrical” wins where I can find them around here.

Turns out, electrolysis wasn’t a new concept to John, he just didn’t think about it with regard to wells.

He went on to tell me that it can happen with water heaters also because, typically, copper pipe is running into a steel tank so to prevent the same decomposing effect from occurring, you need dielectric unions. Then he started talking about anodes and cathodes and some sort of bladder for underground propane tanks and… as his voice faded into white noise, I slipped away to my happy place of planting sunflowers and the new jumpsuit I’m sewing…

Who cares? We have water again!

Honestly, I do try to listen - probably about as much as he tries to listen when I talk about seam allowances or pressure canning. But I’ve learned about grounding, at least, and John makes some mean biscuits and gravy so we’re definitely rubbing off on each other.

Gold

On another note, the price of Gold continues to go up and, if you missed this post about stacking, it’s not too late to learn about preserving your wealth. Whether you’re planning to trade skills, goods, or metals, you’re going to need some sort of back up plan - and soon.

Gold since 1995

As history teaches, following the Yellow Brick Road is the only way we ever reach a truly free market economy - an economy not restrained, manipulated, or tracked by government.

And for those who argue that Gold isn’t practical, I’ll simply leave you with this:

I’m not saying our well guy was interested in being paid in Gold but I’m also not saying he wasn’t.

You’ll never know. And that’s the point, isn’t it?