Tanks. You're WELL-come.

Hopefully about an hour after this posts our water woes will be over.

When I last left you we had figured out the wire giving power to the pump was bad in our well. The next day we put all new wire on the well...a long process of taping the wire tight to the pipe and cleaning everything up. 

IT WORKED!

The heavenly chorus of toilet flushing began.

Then we added some chlorine to the well and started a coliform test. We were hoping everything was back to normal.

Red is good!

Yellow with floaty bits is baaaaaad.

 We failed rather spectacularly which surprised me. So now we were faced with doing an honest-to-God well shock process....but there was a catch...we had zero water pressure upstairs. You can't flush the pipes with no water pressure. We were worried that it was the tank under the house, the only thing we hadn't replaced, and we were worried that chlorine had eroded the rubber bladder and caused that to fail. So it was a Catch-22....you need the new bladder to get the water upstairs but the process could ruin it....or so we thought. Once again the plumber saved the day! He diagnosed a blockage in the pipe (over the phone) and told B how to fix it. It worked like a charm! We suddenly had fabulous pressure upstairs. 

So at about 5pm we added chlorine to the well, tested to make sure we could smell it at all the fixtures, and then turned it off to sit until noon today. Now we are flushing it out through the hose and checking chlorine levels. I went out to check in the middle of writing this post and the chlorine is still WAY TOO HIGH. We'll flush some more. Then we'll do another coliform test....but in the meantime we'll be able to shower (with closed mouths), do laundry and flush toilets. 

We've got enough drinking water so we can be patient.

My garden though, it's been a little impatient about me slacking off on watering. A few thunderstorms have kept it afloat but my petunias are looking a little crispy. With temps in the 100s this week I'm eager to get back to watering.

We had to rescue this tiny watermelon because it was growing in between the mesh.

This is the state of the house right now. That's the old well pipe across the driveway.

 I had a class about groundwater and wells in grad school. We talked about chemistry, physics and did a ton of math. We calculated draw down and cones of depression and porosity and a whole ton of other terrible stuff but...until we pulled our well out of the ground I had no idea what was going on down there. Our well is a large metal pipe that is sunk down into the groundwater. There's a looooonnnnggggg pipe that has a torpedo like well pump attached to the bottom of it. The tank under the house tells the pump that it's low on water and switches it on, it jerks on (kind of imagine one of those stick blenders crossed with a dust buster) and sucks the water up the pipe to the holding tank. That's what your well looks like. Sort of....I really oversimplified this but it's not like....a hole with a bucket in it....or the Tunnel of Love...or a really big straw.

It's also not magic in the sense that it doesn't have a lot of extra doo dads and filters. It's a pretty simple design.

Wish us luck! It's time to test the water again!