Water Pump

It's been a while since I've talked about our life here out in the country.

Usually that means that things are going well and there's not much to report on.

I had blogged before about our water situation.

We get our water through a well. 

You know when you're out in the country and tap water smells like sulfur? Yeah, we didn't want that. 

And as Steve once put it "there's nothing like working in a shop, sweating your ass off in 90-degree weather, only to get into a 'refreshing' shower that smells like rotten eggs"

So yeah. 

We installed a water treatment system so we could have drinkable tap water (we have reverse osmosis drinking water, actually), and not feel like horrible parents bathing our children in legit DIRTY ASS WATER. 

Then we installed a 400-gallon water tank in our basement so we wouldn't run out of water. (After it had happened way too many times).

And then our pump started to take on water and fail.

Steve had to "fix it" several times and it wasn't reliable. 

Mind you, this was our second pump.

The first one shit the bed and we realized it the day we got home from a 7-day long beach vacation. 

And had zero water. 

We always had shitty water pressure.

I remember once buying a water-sprinkler-type thing for the girls and tried using it with our hose. Like, the water dribbled out of it. We ended up bringing it to Steve's parents' house. 

But you know, we just dealt with it.

It's not exactly cheap to keep replacing the pumps...and when we can't really figure out WHY they keep failing on us...ugh.

So Steve recently decided to bite the bullet and bought us a "semi-commercial-grade" water pump. Don't ask how much it cost. Easily 8X the amount of our older pumps. 

This is our water treatment system

Steve installed this himself and it's not a "plug and play" so he had to wire it into our electrical system and added an on/off switch (he added that piece of wood)

Here it is, next to our water tank. 

So yeah. 

It didn't seem to take him that long to install it.

I cannot believe the difference.

When I used the shower for the first time, the second I turned on the water, a gust of wind like blew in my face from the pressure. LOL.

I felt like it was going to blast my skin off it was so powerful.

Steve said it's only on like 50% power. WUT.

We now feel much more confident that this won't fail us. It's meant to handle a LOT. 

But seriously. The amount of work we have done to this house just to have water. 

WATER. 

As much as we'd love the city to come down our way with water, after talking with Farmer Matt, he kinda convinced us otherwise. 

He said that if water comes down our road, it'll just be bought by land developers. No one wants it now because there's no access to public water. No water pipes. It's not easy having commercial property out here without public access to water/sewage. So I kinda get that.

I love that there are no subdivisions around our house.

We believe Farmer Matt and one other family own basically this entire stretch of road, so we're pretty confident subdivisions won't get TOO close. We have 8 acres to ourselves so that is at least a decent barrier and we will NEVER have direct neighbors on either side of us (we have one, but we own up to the land divide and Farmer Matt owns the other side, so no one can build in between us).

Hopefully, this is another (big, expensive) thing we can cross off our list and not deal with for a while.

The first pump failed us in 2018 and we've had ongoing issues ever since. 

So yeah, 3 years is along enough to deal with periodically just not having the ability to access the 400 gallons of water in your basement.