For more than a few weeks (yes, I know and yes, I am embarrassed that it too this long to fix) we have had an underground leak in our irrigation system. It was a slow but steady kind of thing, so we never saw the water bill go up, but that’s not the point… It is wasteful of a very rare and precious resource. Fresh clean water.
We first really noticed it when I dug a hole in the front garden to test the seismograph in that location (another blog topic for another day).
It was a bit muddy, but when I decided that it was not going to work there – it picked up the neighbours washing machine – and took it out, the hole I left filled up with clear water. Freddy made the joke that we should get a goldfish to put in the hole…. It was about then that we we both figured we should really do something about the leak.
Not sure what, but a bee got in Freddys bonnet and she just started digging one day, and before long, she found the leak. A split T piece.
The thing was the hole was near a small palm tree and its roots were a pain to dig near.
Long story short, we spent Fathers Dad digging and fixing the leak.
Long story longer, we had to make Freddys 1 foot square hole a LOT bigger to get at all the pipes and effect a repair.
Terry and I started out with shovels and then hand trowels, but it was super slow going.
Via a combination of thoughts, we ended up using the wet and dry shop vac to dig the hole….. Terry was on the hose with a single high pressure stream cutting into the dirt, I was on the shop vac sucking up the slurry that came from the water stream and Freddy was on the shop vac itself emptying it every time it filled up.
In very short order, we had a much bigger hole.
From there, it was a two goal mission.
Fix the leak, but also put a shut off valve in place… See, the main problem was that we could not shut water off to the irrigation system without also shutting water off to the whole house.
So for three days we had to limp along with a bathtub full of water and using a bucket to flush and stuff.
Long story short, the directions about the PVC glue were a little too brief and on the first go around we did not let it dry long enough. When we turned the water back on, two fittings blew off.
We redid things and let it dry for 2 hours and its been Ok ever since.
ler heads.
My names thebaldgeek and I am not a fan of working on irrigation systems.
