Home Well System Maintenance: "Nor Any Drop to Drink"
Posted: Monday, October 31, 2011
by Jack H. Schick
Our final seven years in Wyoming was spent living in a 16 by 80 foot mobile home on a sandy five acres of sagebrush and grass in the middle of a few hundred square miles of sandy sage brush and grass about ten miles north of Casper. To the south we could see the top of Wardwell Hill maybe four miles away. Over it we could see the top half of Casper Mountain twenty miles beyond. To the east, the horizon was a low rise about ten miles past the interstate. North there was a rocky ‘reef’ that actually had a few pine trees on it. To the west we could only see about half a mile to the top of a low hill that was two roads up from ours.
I’d never lived anywhere where they didn’t pipe water to your house. If it smelled or looked or tasted funny, you called somebody and griped. If you turned on the faucet and nothing came out, you threatened to not pay your bill or sue them. It was a rude awakening when I had to install and maintain a well system. I was never mechanically inclined to begin with. All that was there when I bought the place was a piece of pipe sticking out of the ground. This was Wyoming, rural Wyoming on top of that. I was way out on the wind blown prairie where winters are rough.
The first thing I had to do was dig a well house and a trench to run the water line to where we were going to put the house. The old Wyoming guys from work told me it had to be six feet deep or it would freeze in winter. I moved about 500 cubic feet of dirt before that was over, a lot of it required a pick. Then I had to build the well house. I ended up hiring a buddy to help with that. My carpentry skills…well, stink, actually. Next I had to figure out what I needed and buy the well system: the pressure tank, the controls, pipe, pipe fittings, waterproof wire, and the pump. Plus, I had to figure out how to put it all together so it worked. It was quite a task for a guy who was already a practicing alcoholic, but I got it done.
Actually, that was the easy part. It was keeping it running that was tough. There was little tolerance from a wife with three kids under five years old when the water quit working. I can’t remember all the times I got a call at work. “There’s no water,” is all she’d say. I got pretty good at troubleshooting after a few years. I’d stop at the plumbing store and pick up a few suspected bad parts on the way home and usually have it fixed (before I was let in the house).
It was usually the pressure switch. When the pressure dropped the switch electrically closed and the pump came on. The switch had two ‘contacts.’ They’d get worn and not work, or the pressure port would clog up from the bad water. It was a cheap part, so I just replaced it. The most comical episode (to me at least--she never seemed to see humor in the fact she that couldn’t do laundry or flush the toilet), was the grasshopper incident. The well house was far from tightly sealed. Whenever I’d go down into it I’d have to knock away spider webs and pound on the walls to scare the black widows back into their hiding places. That time, when I pulled the cover off the pressure switch I found a big grasshopper between the ‘points.’ The well ran fine until it fried him dry and broke the contact.
Sometimes the fix was not so easy. Sometimes I had to pull up the pump. It was 90 feet down hanging on a piece of rope attached to a plastic pipe with a set of three wires running down to it. It was heavy. I’d unbolt the well cap and start heaving on the rope. It took two people. My wife would take the end with the well cap on and start walking off through the sage brush while I was splitting my guts pulling the pump out of the hole. It got lighter as it got closer to the surface, but by then she was staggering along dragging 70 feet of pipe behind her.
Our well system didn’t always break down in good weather. The pump pulling episode I remember most isn’t comical, even to me. I felt bad for her. It was a raging Wyoming blizzard. The snow was a couple feet deep and the wind was 30 miles an hour out of the north. The wind chill was about zero. I was sheltered below ground in the well house. When I took a moment’s break from heaving on the rope, I poked my head up over the edge to see how she was doing. I could hardly see her, only 50 feet away through the blowing snow. As I watched, feeling a little sorry for her, she stumbled and fell down in a snow drift. As she struggled to her feet the wind blew her hat off. It slid across the snow and up against the propane tank. She picked up the end of the pipe and continued dragging it away. She really wanted that water turned back on. I really felt bad when it took me a couple of days to fix it.
You know, I still have that pump. It’s up in the attic, and I bet it still works. There’s no reason it shouldn’t. It was an expensive, good one. The last day I was at the little house on the prairie I pulled it out of the well, hack sawed off the pipe, snipped the wires and threw it in the back of the moving van. If I ever get too mad at the borough over the water bill, maybe I’ll drill a well and throw it down the hole.
The thing is, in the 25 years since we left Wyoming, I can’t remember being without water once. Oh, yeah, they put new pipes in on our street one summer, but they always had it back on at the end of the working day.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Great article. Civilization does not creep in. It is the lack of civilization that creeps in. I admire you for your Wyoming experience. Denver, drive oh, 100 miles in any direction and you are touching wilderness. Your efforts at just getting water is what most Americans think nothing of. Not to change the topic, but water is going to become more of an issue, even for cities. Thanks for your great piece. You know, out here in the west, we are replete with people during blizzards, going out to the cows, or the outhouse, or the chickens and losing their way back home, just a few feet away and freezing to death. But that's another story.
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