Paulitics of Moral Celery

This is part of a series on what we’ve been doing and learning with our house. We’ve had a number of interesting experiences, and a lot of learning around water treatment specifically.

Warning: this particular post may be a bit unsettling to your stomach.

We have a 5000 gallon water tank for a buffer for our well.

So, one of the things we knew we needed to do was clean it. While the house was bank owned, it sat stagnant for about 6 months. Smelled like a pond, quite slimy, and came back positive for coliform (though not e.coli).

So, we turned off the pump and regularly checked the tank to see when it was low enough to scrape/spray the sides down. When it got low enough, we would open the fire hose drain at the bottom and let the lovely sludge all out. We borrowed my dad’s pool leaf cleaner things to help get some of the sludge out as well.

Well, it was going pretty well. The manhole at the top is kinda small and we didn’t smell too good after using the pool cleaner bag thingy in it – it would come up full of sludge, but in order to dump it out you’d have to hold it rather close to you … so we kinda ended up covered in gray sludge and smelling like a walking stagnant pond.

We ended up finding about six dead and mostly decomposed mice… some were skeletons, some were skeletons and fur, and some were in that half decomposed stage where the skin isn’t gone yet but the inside is just a mush. So it was a mouse shaped bag of decomposed who-knows-what.

We almost finish draining… except for the last few inches, because the fire hose pipe isn’t quite at the very bottom of the tank. So we decide to use a sump pump. It works somewhat well, and then dies (it was quite old and was almost buried in the ground when we got the house; used to be used to pump water out of a little drain thing at the back of the house that routinely flooded). So we get a new one and use that; works pretty well.

Then disaster strikes! There are two float switches in the water tank; one controls the pressure pump so that it will not turn on if there is too little water in the tank (to prevent the pressure pump from running dry). The other controls the deep well pump, preventing the tank from overfilling. Well, after we were done cleaning the tank, it’s Saturday night and we decide we want to quit, go to bed, and have enough water for showers. I lowered one of the floatswitches in (the tank is basically empty at this point). All fine. The next floatswitch is meant to stay underwater, so it has a weight on it. I started lowering that one in and it slips from my hands, hits the other one, and knocks that one off it’s cable. Doh! The floatswitch is now at the bottom of the 5000 gallon tank, which has no internal ladder, smells horrible, and is around 12 feet tall… and it’s rather dark out. We decide we’ll work on it tomorrow.

We look online and decide we should try to fish it out. Back we go with the leaf-catchers. Eventually, we do get the float switch up. It was dark, and if we turned the pressure pump on, it would end up kinda plugging the outlet at the bottom of the tank. Well, we get it up the next day…. and it’s missing a little plastic teeth piece that holds it on to the cable. That little piece is just a relatively thin plastic piece, maybe a couple inches wide and 1/4 inch thick. Can’t buy them separately. Katharyn begins looking with the leaf catcher.

Disaster strikes again; our leaf catcher thing has an extension pole on it. The extension pole part comes loose, and the bottom half falls into the tank and lays flat on the bottom. Eventually, we fish that out with a hose that has a spray nozzle – and thus a handle, acting like a hook – on the end.

Well, Eventually, Katharyn is actually able to find it after an hour or two of looking for it with the leaf catcher. I put the float switch back together and VERY carefully put it back in the water. Then we put our ozone generator thingy in there, connect everything up, turn the well pump back on.

We took really, really long showers with a lot of soap after these episodes. It’s really hard to get the slimy smell off!

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