Norris Family News

Blogging while babysitting the pump

Today's blog entries are courtesy of our well pump. What? Let me explain. We are blessed with an amazing water system here at the House of Cornelius. It's essentially a small-scale, municipal system that produces bottled-quality water to all the taps and houses on the campus. It's a highly complex system operating in a hot, harsh environment that treats hard and sometimes muddy water that is full of minerals. It is contained in four small buildings over a football-field-sized area. The past few weeks the well pump has been shutting down mysteriously. When that happens, the rest of the system soon follows as the water pressure drops. If not tended to, our 3000 gallon tank is quickly depleted and then we're hot and thirsty! It's a vicious cycle. If we don't notice that the pump is off, then the 3 hour water softener cycle is interrupted, which means that the reverse osmosis system will try to filter hard water. The system pressure will skyrocket and blow a fuse. Then we have several things to fix and we can't "make water" until the softener goes through a cycle.

The past few days the problem has been much worse, such that we were almost out of water yesterday. The pump is supposed to turn on automatically when the pressure in the pressure tanks goes below a threshold. But it has been periodically failing to do so. We found that if we turn off the power and then turn it back on, the pump will turn on and continue normally. Unfortunately today this problem has been occurring every 10-15 minutes! Praise God, the pump guy is coming tomorrow. But in the meantime, we need to make water and fill the tank.

So after spending a few frustrating hours, walking back and forth, trying to accomplish things and to keep the pump running, I decided to get a lawn chair and set up shop in the shade of the pump building. It's quite nice really, even though I feel slightly imprisoned. There are several kinds of birds that alight nearby and sing. One of them has an incredible repertoire of sounds. He will repeat the same sound three or four times and then switch to something else. The sounds range from robotic sounds to beautiful songs and twitters. Praise God!

UPDATE: The contactor (the thing that turns on the water pump when needed) had dirty contacts. After the pump guy came and we debugged the system, I took apart the contactor and saw that the contacts themselves were literally blasted away from the high voltage sparks each time they slammed together. I filed them into shape again and the thing is working smoothly! Praise God!

-- Thaine