So today’s weather was just kinda miserable — one of those really hot and humid sort of days. I noticed that officially at the airport this afternoon (in Morris) the temperature/heat index reached 86/89 respectively.

God Bless September in Minnesota, right?

The air was thick — cut it with a knife thick. A good day to stay inside. Which is what I ended up doing for most of the day.

Both utilities came out today to do their locates so we can possibly dig up and install new water line between the house and well. I was quite pleased with the job done by the phone company — exactly what I wanted. Not so pleased with the power company’s job. They marked their underground line along the road right of way, but didn’t do a locate between the pole (where the main meter resides) and the service entrance to the house.

I called them about this and they said it wasn’t their problem — that it was ‘secondary wiring’ and would be the responsibility of an electrician to do a locate. To which I say ‘phbbt!’

It just seems ridiculous to do something like that when a) the ‘call before you dig’ thing is a state law, and b) it’s pretty obvious that while it may be secondary wiring, it’s still service cable and not the random things that might be typically installed by an electrician (garage feeds or random electric on posts in the yard, etc.). I guess I can chalk this up to another unhappy moment with my power company, Agralite. I guess that sort of ‘not my problem’ attitude is what I get for my $30/month ‘access charge’ fee just to have the privilege of being an Agralite customer (when I have no other choice).

As you can tell, I’m not really pleased with them. They provide reasonable enough power and have reasonable load management options, but for being a member-owned cooperative, they seem to really have a big-ass bureaucratic structure. My favorite is when you call to their office about something trivial and get transferred from person to person.

Seriously — how difficult is it to answer a question about load management and how to tap into the control box? That was my last previous incident with them prior to this beautiful engagement.

So enough about the power company. I’ve got a query in with a local electrician to see if they can come out (hopefully for cheap/free) and do a locate. If not, I’ll have to rely on the well guys to figure it out, I guess.

Speaking of well guys, I called them today to inform that the locates were done and we could dig anytime. The guy [who had been here last week] called me back, oddly enough while making salsa and getting habanero and lime juices in his eye. Anyway, I got the distinct impression that he doesn’t really want to dig in a new line if at all possible. So after a brief exchange (due to his need to get his eye flushed out), he came to the conclusion that we should try a few other things (namely in the house) to see if we can pinpoint the cause/source of the leak before doing major excavation.

I can respect that, so I did some investigative work myself tonight. I thought it might have something to do with the ‘pipe to nowhere’ that goes out on the east side of the house, but that was closed off and shouldn’t be a cause (since opening up the gate valve — a trick in and of itself — caused the water pressure to drop to about 10PSI). I then also went outside and looked for soft or wet spots in the yard again. No such luck.

But, I did put a few random things I’ve noticed into context tonight. When the well guys were here, they tested the water pressure at the hydrant which is between the house and well. They specifically noted it wasn’t draining back when shut off. At the time I told them that it behaved properly the first time one would use it (say in a day) — where it would take a few seconds for water to come once you opened the valve — but the successive uses generally produced near-immediate water.

Well, yesterday I re-filled the dog water tub. And I noticed that the water which pooled up below the hydrant when allowed to run on the ground didn’t really get soaked up right away. Furthermore, I noticed tonight that the only soft(er) spot in the yard is right around the hydrant.

This leads me to believe (after putting it all into context) that perhaps the magic leak is somewhere around the hydrant and its connection to the water line. It seems a reasonable guess, and something which I’ll pass on when the diagnostic work is getting done…which I’m told won’t likely be tomorrow but will be sometime this week.

So for now we’re still on the ‘kick the pump on as needed’ thing…but it’s evolved into more of a ‘let’s use water during this period of time and leave the pump running continuously for an hour or two during said time’ sort of thing. And it seems to work out pretty well that way.

The mystery still exists — and I can’t wait to get it fixed. I can only hope that it is indeed in the area of the hydrant, because that will make the excavation much simpler than digging in a whole new line and also not mean interfering with the telephone service and presumably also the power service.

We’ll see how this evolves over time. At least when it’s all said and done we should have a reasonably good water supply once again and probably also have this pressure tank business replaced and working the way it should.

In other random news, Kirstin is 188 days old today! Crazy stuff.

So until next time…

“The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows.”
– Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)

–MZ