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Fixing a Waterlogged Pressure Tank
The pump kicked on at 6:10 that morning while I was standing at the utility room sink with a headlamp still on my forehead, and it kicked off again before I finished rinsing a coffee cup. That is a cycle of maybe eight seconds. A healthy system seems to run a minute or more. The…
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What a Pressure Tank Does
The pressure tank is the most misunderstood piece of equipment on a private well. Most people think it stores water. It does a little of that, but storage is not its job. Its job at my place is giving the pump a rest. Inside the tank I pulled, there was a bladder with compressed gas…
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Failures During Outages, Freezes, and Droughts
I’ll admit something first, because it cost me a winter. Years ago, when the first hard freeze came early, I left a garden hose screwed onto the frost-free bib by the barn and forgot it. The valve body split inside the wall, quiet as you like, and I didn’t find it until the thaw, when…
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Treating Well Water With Hydrogen Peroxide
A lot of people believe the brown bottle in the medicine cabinet will fix problem well water. It will not. Treating a well with hydrogen peroxide is real work done with a stronger solution, a metering pump, and a contact tank — or it is not done at all. Here is how I think about…
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Well Water Appearance and Odor Problems
The jar was already sitting on my tailgate when I got out of the truck. Ruth had filled it that morning and driven it over herself, which she does not do unless something has her worried. She had a hand-dug well out east of town, an old one under a wooden lid, and the water…
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How a Residential Well Works
The pressure gauge spun to zero before I had it threaded on all the way, and Marta said the words I hear every August: “It was fine yesterday.”” She was holding the gauge hose in one hand and a coffee in the other, standing at her hose bib in the sun. Her shallow well had…
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How to Build a Water Storage System
The first water storage system worth building is a barrel, a spigot, and a calendar. Two drums in the garage Start with treated water in a container you can seal. That is the whole system. A hand pump sits on the shelf next to them because a drum without a way to get water out…
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Sanitizing Water Containers Before Use
A man at the co-op last month had a pickup bed full of blue barrels and a question for me. He said his brother told him to rinse them out with bleach and let them dry in the sun, but his wife said that was how you got sick. He wanted to know who was…
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How to Test Well Water at Home
Most of what people do wrong with well water starts with testing the wrong thing first. The strip kit on the shelf A home strip kit is a screening tool and nothing more. The ones I keep on the shelf seem to read chlorine, hardness and pH. I learned this the same way most well…
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Shock Chlorination for Wells Overview
The morning Carla knocked on the back door, I was filling the chlorine test vial on the tailgate. She had a mason jar in each hand, both cloudy. The one from her kitchen tap had a gray cast to it, and there was a smell off it you could catch from two feet away. Her…