Having a bad day...

Well things were going well. We went out last Saturday, and worked all day, and got the overhang ready for the soffit material. We got the foam in place, and all the Trex boards were attached where they needed to go. Exhaust pipes are in place. We have wires run through the insulation over the wall to provide power to the front door lights, and the outside outlet.

This evening we were going to start putting on siding on the front. I got a call from the well driller as I headed out to meet my folks. He was wondering if I was ready for him to install the well pump. I told him that I was. He said he would need to know how far it was from the house to the well. I told him I would run a tape measure through the conduit so I could get him an accurate number and would let him know tomorrow what it was. Well dad and I started to fish the tape down the conduit from the well toward the house. It didn't go very far, before it seemed to get stuck. I figured it was just getting hung up trying to get past one of the joints. We went inside, and dad had the idea to take some wire I had bought and try to push that through, since it would be stiffer, then we could use it to fish the tape, or a string or whatever through the conduit. Ok, so we started pushing that in from outside. It seemed to get stopped a short distance in.

Ok, lets try pushing from inside. We had to move a couple things out of the way, and I got down, and started pushing the wire through, as dad fed it to me. It went quite a ways then it seemed to get stuck. Uh, oh, I was getting a bad feeling. I asked dad to go outside and see if the wire had gone all the way through. I told him if he didn't see the wire sticking out, he should try calling down through the pipe to see if it was still open. While he was head out, I noticed the pipe for the future solar hot water had a little mud sitting in the bottom. Dad had been gone long enough that he should have called to me by that point. I looked at the pipe for the communications conduit. It had a lot of mud in the bottom of it. This was not looking good. Dad came back in, and asked if I had heard him. At that point, I knew the well line was blocked. Most likely it had broken, and mud had seeped in and filled it up.

We got a flashlight, and looked into the pipes. I couldn't see a problem in the well line, but I knew it was well blocked. I could see water sitting in the fitting for the solar thermal and there was mud on the floor below it, so I knew it was broken somewhere. I not only had mud all along the bottom of the communications pipe but I could see where the pipe transitioned to the grey conduit, it was shifted out of place.

So my pipes have breaks in multiple places. We will have to go in, dig them up, replace the pipe, and bury them again. I have some ideas on ways to reduce the chance of another break, but this is going to be time consuming to fix and cost more money to redo things that I thought were done.

I was still going to pick up the well pump, so I could at least talk to the well driller about the sort of connection that would be needed. I stopped at my storage unit, and went to unlock it, and found that the key was missing from my key ring!

Mondays suck!!