ray...
The happy Nada Farmer, look what I found at the end of the rainbow, here at the Briar Patch which is NADA FARM.
Keep coming back, page Forty four follows......soon.
Good grief Charlie Brown, still the freakin' WATER???
Ok it's not that bad, but man I wish I had a decent well.. The systems as they are currently installed, consist of a well with a pump providing water to the cistern. This portion is controlled by a timer, operating a relay, operating a pump minder, operating the pump, a float valve in the tank that triggers a pressure switch to stop the pump when the tank (cistern ) is full. 
Then the Cistern system pumps water to a tank under the house with another pressure switch, that responds to regular water usage, turning on taps and flushing, flushing, flushing. I can't believe the number of times the toilets flush around here in a day. Anyway, the system is burning up the contacts on the well pump pressure controlled switch. I thought I had it de bounced, by redirecting the water into the tank, at first it was gushing in at such a rate that it caused splashing, so heavily that the tank ball was bouncing and causing the pressure to bounce quite rhythmically, which is not good in this instance, though I think you could dance to it, if the music on the radio is any indication. I added a regular 120 volt set of plugs, so I could use power tools and later add a heat strip for those areas that will need it this winter.
The PenTek pump controller ( the blue box at the top of the enclosure to the left, is a data logger and records information about the pump in the well). But of course you need a special piece of equipment to get that information out. The INFORMER, I started out by asking everyone i could find to borrow one, they looked at me like I'm nuts. I guess they knew something I didn't. It tells me stuff, but I have a hard time understanding what it means. LIke when it says the pump runs for 2 hours... more below.
Here you can see the water in the tank, it is blue! That's because it's "city water" that was delivered, so it has chlorine and who knows what in it, but I had to have drinking quality water delivered to keep the tank from "floating up" in case it rained while it was being installed. Back to the bouncing ball.. So I put an elbow on it and directed the water toward the side of the tank , eliminating the splash and bounce action. But the switch (the small gray box in front of my right foot in the picture at the left, and larger below) still bounced. I then reduced the spring pressure to as low as I could in the hopes it would only barely open and close. That was a bust, fortunately there is a feature of the Pump Minder that is called" rapid cycle shut down". This aspect kicks in when the "Minder" senses 4 attempts to start in a 60 second period. Then the pump is turned off, until the power is manually removed and reset. Ahaa! Here is where the timer is a great idea. The timer is set to let the pump run for 15 minutes of the hour. Which means every 45 minutes the pump minder will be reset, thus eliminating the need to monitor the pump minder. There are two lights on the front of the unit which show what's happening. So when I build the enclosure for this mess, I will leave a window that the lights can be seen through. So the power to the well pump is monitored by equipment, and the power for the cistern pump is only monitored by the fact we are using it constantly. So far the well runs dry about twice a day, but we are unaffected. And as soon as the timer board is installed, I hope to eliminate running the well dry. Though I was told it's not good to run the well dry, it has increased the time between run dry by a half hour. Now I think that means it is a good thing for the well to run dry, but it may soon max out and that would be an indication to me to get things completed.
After I had the tank in the ground, bedded in pea gravel, and half filled with water, I finally got around to taking the lid off. Which involved cutting a pretty "heavy duty" zip strip, and turning the lid about 15 degrees and lifting it off, without dumping anything in it, because it was half full of what is to become my drinking water, among other things. And there, screwed to the inside of the lid, were the instructions for installing and using the tank. I had wondered if there was anything special about this tank and there it was all the information I should have had three weeks ago. It didn't make any difference really, I knew how the tank would best be installed from the training I had through BUSTER, where they were removing underground tanks that didn't conform to current regulations about underground storage tanks, though they were fuel installations, not water, and they had monitoring wells, to check for leaks of fuel into the underground water tables. And other systems to make them safe, most of which are silly for a tank of water, that is pumped from the very ground in which the tank is buried.
But as far as the clearances required, and the pea gravel bed and surround, and the depth to protect from freezing, that I already knew. What I didn't know was, there are risers available to allow the lid to be raised above ground level when the tank is buried the proper depth in the ground. It would have been nice to know, so that I could have ordered the riser when I was placing the tank, and installed it to the correct depth with confidence.
It turns out, it is going to work out fine, but only because of my incredible experience and expertise. Or maybe dumb luck , I'm fairly sure it depends who you ask, just don't ask Chris. When I finally found the paperwork I called the company I bought the tank from and they are ordering the riser. When I receive it, i can finish burying the tank. Of course it is too big to UPS, and anything else is crazy expensive, so I get to drive to Streetsboro to pick it up. 
Another day shot in the ass. Oddly enough the water still looks blue, It must be the camera, cause it looks clear to me when I see it, anyway the riser is in place and the hole is being gently filled in with gravel and then a clay cap so the water will run off the area, then I'm building a little house to cover it all and keep tractors from driving over the tank area. Pretty crafty huh? Speaking of driving, the Ford pickup truck I got from Curtis, well it was making this horrendous grinding noise whenever it was in four wheel drive, and I turned a corner. That noise stopped, right after it (the truck) stopped turning, So I found that the trouble was the universal joints in the front wheel drive mechanism, had become universally un jointed. It seems there are supposed to be little rollerbeaings in the cups , almost pin like, in design. And when they all fall out the wear factor seems to increase exponentially. Sort of, to the point of tearing the ends off both the drive shaft, and the driven spindle. I'm still not privy to the cost of these replacement parts, but I know they have to be replaced or repaired, and bearings and ball joints, and brake discs, and pads, and all sorts of things, are going to be involved. I wouldn't mind so much if the rust factor wasn't so high on the truck. It has rusted through areas on the frame, the body is already bondo-ed rather heavily in areas, and I have already replaced some of the spring brackets and shims, and repaired the rusted through oil pan, still a Ford design anathema in my opinion. So I am hesitant to put much money in it's repair however I am in no position to replace it with a better vehicle at this time either. So, I'm between Iraq and an oil spill, yet again, I just wish I had the money that comes with that position, (BP). By the way are you aware that the TruckStops of America chain was a BP operation until 1993? I only knew because of teaching some safety classes for them during that era, great money. Weird situation, not sure what happened.
UPDATE: Ok , some of what I've written is pure crap! I didn't know it at the time but, I have no idea where THE INFORMER gets it's information. So far as I can tell, the well runs dry in about 40 seconds. The INFORMER says it takes 2 hours and 28 minutes, now I sat there and watched, with a stop watch , and it's 38 seconds! The well runs dry every time and I can't control the timer to less than one minute and 15 seconds.. So like my buddy Richard mentioned to me long ago, at the start of this fiasco," You gotta throttle that well down a lot, to control it.." Well, the man is right, I have since replaced the left turn adapter and open butt system with a 3/8 hole in a cap that restricts the water to a point that the well doesn't run dry! In fact it runs for 1.25 minutes at the half hour and 2.5 minutes on the hour and we have more water than we need! WEIRD! The well runs a total of 90 minutes a day. And it's keeping the tank so full it refuses to allow anymore water in. Actually I'm sorta concerned that our being so careful with the water for so long we aren't going to use the water fast enough, and the system will overflow. 
We can actually do a load of wash straight through, now. We previously had to let it fill, and then stop the machine, let it soak and wait a couple hours, before allowing the rinse and spin, or it would run the well dry. Couldn't take back to back showers, and had to be careful about washing the dishes, on days extra showers were needed. And of course we had to bring water in barrels if we wanted to have a successful visit with family, while allowing indoor toilet use, through the alternate flushing system installation. Really, it has been rather "third-world"ly around here at times. But that is hopefully now at an end. Of course, I still have to get this system through a winter, and it is located "atop the windiest and coldest hill area" on the property.
Being a total "glutton for punishment" and seeing how well this has worked, has me interested in doing the same for the little house. It will be much easier, as the water already flows, under its own power, into the small cistern in the spring house. And the pump and piping are already in place and functioning well, at least now that I have located and repaired the leak. Which, while repairing the leak, I found where the water line runs and where the fittings are, in that system , being as they are the most likely places for future leaks. And I feel pretty confident that the knowledge base of what is going on here, is about complete now.
Of course I have tractor issues this month as well, small thing, a 15.5 x38 tractor tire needed to be removed repaired and reinstalled. No big deal except that it weighs about as much as I do, fortunately it is also shaped like me and rolls pretty easily. The biggest challenge was, as always with tractor tires I am discovering, getting it off the rim, as they tend to be rusted on. The tube had only one hole in it, no patches, amazing.
The equipment I have is just barely large enough to work on this one, and while I had it off the ground I decided to move the wheel out, so they are about equal on the axles. That wheel hadn't been moved for a very very long time. I managed not to tear the tire while getting off the rim, but there was already a hole in it, which I sewed up, before putting it back on. I'm hoping it lasts till next spring when I might have the money to buy a newer set of tires. New tires would cost as much as I paid for the tractor. Farming is expensive, glad we're NadaFarm.
I chiseled most of the rust off and "wire wheeled" the rim before I painted it, hopefully it will last as long as I need it to, FOREVER! I knocked the big dents out of the side of the rim as well, though I've had people tell me you can't do that either.. What do people do, buy a new rim because of a dent? They must be made of money .
It's kinda ugly but it works, for a while. I'm hoping this holds till I can get another tire. But it is gaping open, already. I mowed the field with crossed fingers, hard to hold the steering wheel like that.
