Water Woes

March 28th - April 22nd, 2022

After getting back to Ocean Falls on March 28th we took very little time off.  It was hard to rest when there was such a long list of things still needing to be done.  Everywhere we looked we saw things to do, but slowly our house was becoming a home rather than a construction project. 

After finishing painting our living room ceiling we moved all of the furniture that was being stored in the kitchen and dining room area back into the living room. 

This allowed us to begin work on the kitchen area.  

And after more wall work and painting, our kitchen is now finally a real kitchen, with pots and pans in the cupboards and cutlery in the drawers.   

It was so nice to finally be able to cook a meal with everything that we needed easily accessible.   

On April 18^th I made bread and buns for the first time in our new home, and we made a big batch of pasta sauce to freeze.   

 

One of the many projects that we have worked on since getting back home is our water.  Back in December the town finally got the water line fixed that supplies water to four of the houses on our street.  However, we only had 18psi of water pressure.  With only 18psi of water pressure where it comes into the house that ended up meaning even less in the kitchen, and barely a trickle coming out at the upstairs shower.  Luckily there is a downstairs shower in our house, which we were still able to use, but 18psi is not very much.  Our hot water was never truly hot when it arrived in the kitchen because it was moving through the copper pipes so slowly that it was cooling down before reaching the faucet.  Doing dishes was both time-consuming and tedious.  We knew for certain that our issue was due to at least one leak somewhere in our outside water line because there was a constant flow of water coming out of the bank below the house and running down into the ditch.   

When the forecast was for a stretch of nice weather, Jason began to dig.  All of the digging needed to be done by hand because our house is situated on a terraced slope and it is impossible to get any machinery in to help.  

Jason chose to start to dig at our shutoff valve, which is about eight feet away from our house.  It turned out that the shutoff valve was about six feet below ground, and that the 3/4” copper line then dove steeply downward due to the terraces.  We also discovered right away that we had at least one leak on the house side of the valve because Jason could see that there was water flowing down towards the shutoff. 

Luckily we were able to shut this leak off while digging, however, unfortunately we also had a major leak on the town side of the shutoff valve, which we were not easily able to get turned off. 

The valve that controlled the flow of water to the four houses on our street was not working, so in order to shut off the water for us it would have meant that our whole side of town would be without water.  So, with the water still turned on from the town side, Jason proceeded to dig downward using a combination of bucketing out water and then digging out dirt.  It got to the point where it took the two of us; Jason would scoop up the bucket of water and pass it out to me, and I would then dump it out past the edge of his hole.  He was down about eight feet at the point when he was finally able to feel the leak.  He could not see the pipe, as the constant pressure of water gushing out of the hole stirred up so much rock and dirt that it was impossible to see anything, and we were unable to scoop out the full amount of water.   

On the house side of our shutoff valve, Jason had dug the hole forwards, toward the house, until getting to a very obvious hole in the copper line.  Hoping that that was the only break, we turned on the water at our shutoff valve to check, but it turned out that there was a second break in the line between the big one and the valve.  Hoping that that was all, we decided to simply remove and replace the entire section (about eight feet of the line), and with borrowed parts from the town we used a compression fitting on the house end to join the old copper pipe to our new plastic one.   

We also attempted to fix the lower leak while the water from the town was still live, as it was late in the day and our options were to have no water that night, or to make it work.  We wanted it to work!  Cutting the copper pipe below the leak was the hardest part.  Working in the narrow trench eight feet down we crouched with the icy cold water steadily rising around us.  The leak pushed rocks and grit around everywhere, and while trying to turn the pipe cutter around and around it was hard to keep the area clear beneath the pipe.  Constantly the hole was filling back in, with dirt settling to the lowest point.  With our hands in the icy water we had to keep scooping out the dirt while trying to keep the pipe cutter on securely and following the same line.  Several times we had to stop, leave the pipe cutter on, and bucket out the water that was getting too deep.  Finally the line came free.  We had a shark-bite ball valve fitting, and with the ball valve open, we slipped it over the copper line, and with our fingers crossed, we closed the valve.  The upwelling of water stopped.  Yeah.  Now for the first time, we were able to bucket out the water down to the level where the leak and the cut were.  We inserted the plastic line into the ball valve fitting and with icy fingers, wet boots, and our hopes high, we opened the valve.  No water gushed from anywhere.  Excitedly, we went inside and opened the sink faucet.  Water gushed out at a rate that we had never seen in our house before.  Our gauge read 50psi.  Yippee!!!!   

We have now been enjoying the novelty of good water pressure.  The water comes to the kitchen sink hot, and instead of showering in our small, crappy downstairs shower, we have been enjoying the spacious layout of our upstairs shower.  It was a lot of hard work, but we had success.  And although the fix is somewhat temporary, as the parts will need to be changed at some point to give us a proper shut off, there is now no rush, and we have water!