Hi, Phoenix here continuing the series springtime on the homestead. Last time, I talked about how K and I are fixing up a house that hadn’t been lived in for years. It had no electricity, running water, propane, or heating. In the previous post, I described the solar system we put up. In this post, I’ll describe our adventures in getting running water.

We thought it would just be a matter of having water in the cistern, pumping it up to the tank, and letting it gravity-feed to the faucets. Boy were we naïve. As soon as we started pumping water, we discovered a broken pipe in the ceiling of the coat closet. The drywall had been cut out already and the pipe section looked like it had been replaced before. The leak was disappointing, but easy enough to fix with some plastic tubing, silicon glue, and hose clamps.

After everything dried, we started pumping water again. This time, it started raining in the master bedroom, along the seam of a drywall panel. We had no idea where the leak might be. Before tearing out sections of the ceiling, we went up to the roof and made sure the tank itself was intact. All good. 

So, since we didn’t know where the pipes were within the ceiling, we began cutting small sections of drywall to locate and inspect the pipes. After several hours, we found the leak–it looked like the water hadn’t been emptied from the system over winter and had frozen and burst the pipe. The leak was large, but we fixed it in the same way as the previous leak and let it dry. Before fixing up the ceiling, we pumped water again to make sure the leak was fixed. It looked good so we filled the upstairs tank and got water coming through  the faucets. 

We put up new drywall by screwing the new sections into the beams. We sealed the seams with mesh tape and joint compound and then painted it to match the rest of the ceiling. Not too shabby if I say so myself.

Later that day we came back to find the bathroom and mudroom flooded. We eventually found the culprit; a small crack in a valve in the mudroom had slowly drained the tank. The water pooled in the mudroom and eventually under the floating wall into the bathroom. 

We’ve tried to fix this leak using hose clamps with no luck. The pipes are too close together to use a pipe cutter or a standard crescent wrench to replace the valve. It might be time to call in an expert. Stay tuned. 

Next blog post: Part 4: Springtime on the homestead–getting running water continued