Neanderpundit

I had issues with pipes freezing, and decided that I had had about enough of that crap. Letting the damned water trickle for a month so it didn’t freeze was not my idea of a good time. Problem is, the spot where it froze was inaccessible.

See, the city water comes into the house through the old well pit, and the well and well pump are still in there. it’s a manhole, and the manhole is plenty big enough for me to get down, but the pump sitting on the wellhead occupies a large portion of the available space. So yesterday, partner (Who can still wear the jeans he wore in high school) slid his skinny ass down in there and unbolted the pump, and today, I yanked it out of the hole.

It has a threaded hole in top for a lifting eye, and I used the cherrypicker to get it out of there. Oddly enough, the pump was actually not that heavy, it was just that the pipe was stuck in place.
Took a solid half hour to go from that to this.

The pump doesn’t weigh anything, like maybe 75 lbs, so once I got it this far I unscrewed it and yanked it. I notched the boards underneath so I could have a way to keep the pipe from dropping, but it turns out I didn’t need that. The damned thing was stuck, and I had to use the cherry picker to yank it every inch of the way. Thankfully, the well is ridiculously shallow, only about 40 feet, so it was two pieces of pipe.

Anyway, after most of a days backbreaking work in the rain, it’s all done, and out, and the old well is capped, and I can get down in the hole and put a new heat tape on the incoming line.

I’ve messed with some deep wells, and I’m glad this wasn’t one.

Is reminding me how many morons are out there. I have had to use “Block” so many times it’s not funny, and I like “Block”

it has also made me go back to comfortable, enjoyable things; I have gone back to reading wells and pratchett and Le Carre and Michael Connely, because they let me escape from stupidworld into places I think are a little less stupid.

Granted, pratchett’s politics are stunningly ignorant, and Wells was a dreamer with little knowledge of science, and most of the other people I enjoy are just nuts, but they are nuts in a predictable way.

So I haven’t read as much new stuff as I ought, and my reading list is always long, but I have been enjoying this antidote to the ignorance of humanity. It keeps me away from the knives, so that’s good.