Tuesday Tool Apres le Deluge edition

I'm afraid the tool of the day is a repeat.  It's the muck boot.  We had at least two inches of rain overnight, and I spent the day dealing with it.  The rain (combined with a few 40mph gusts of wind as a prelude) revealed some inadequacies in our current goat housing, and made the poor critters quite unhappy.  No frolicking--just staying in the dogloo and moping.

So, the day was spent cleaning out soaked bedding and winterizing.  If you're doing that, you want muck boots.

One Year Later

It's been one year since we purchased our farm.  Here's a panorama from December of 2011

 And here's a panorama from today.

 

 By all means, click on them to blow them up. It is somewhat gratifying to see the difference this way; working here all the time, the changes tend to be incremental and less noticeable.  Left to right...there's a new truck, a necessary vehicle for the farm; most of the driving I do day-to-day is in this, hauling hay and building supplies.  You can see the house, the forest of dangerous trees having been removed.  The steel gateposts marking the entry to the field have been removed, and a new road put in.  In the far distance, you can see the reservoir shed, just to the left of the big pine tree that had its lower branches pruned out.  To the left of the big oak with the water tank beneath it, you can see the SHMU (SHeep Mobility Unit), where half of our sheep live.  There's a lot fewer brambles overall. Before you get to the center of the panorama, the old sheep barn that was getting swallowed by brambles has been removed.  Closing out the panorama, you can see the nice new four foot, no-climb and electric perimeter fence along our driveway.  

It's hard to see in the photos, but the population has changed.  There are a dozen or so chooks, six Nigerian Dwarf Goats, and sixteen Shetland sheep.  None of them are visible in today's shot, but one of the goats was trying to eat my pants as I was taking the pictures.  

There is a lot that can't be seen--almost all of the work on the house, for example.  And there's a lot that hasn't been touched, such as everything across the creek.  But, there is progress.  In today's panorama, you can see some earthmoving equipment involved with putting up a new barn.  One of the people there did a bit of work here about when the first picture was taken, and hadn't been back since.  He said he was amazed at how different the place looks. 

Wednesday wordage

Q:  Which is the odd one out?
a) Bloop
b) Slow Down
c) Train
d) Mistpouffers
e) Julia

A: (Highlight for answer: They are all unexplained noises; Mistpouffers is the only one that is not an undersea phenomenon.  I absolutely love that there are replicated observations of inexplicable things.  I was reminded of this by the What If blog's mention of the Oh My God Particle.)

Tuesday Tool: the Saga of the waters

I don’t know the exact name of this one.  It’s a device required for the final stages of a complete plumbing system.  Since we have a nearly complete plumbing system, it’s appropriate.  But, to begin at the beginning…

We bought this property understanding that the water system needed some work. Water for the house came from a well, was pumped uphill over a hundred meters to a concrete reservoir, then was pumped another hundred meters to the house.  This basic set-up is not a problem, but its condition was troubling.

The well was grim.  Inside the dilapidated wellhouse, the well presented itself as a metal pipe, six inches in diameter, protruding a few inches from the muddy ground and leading to the bottomless depths.  A couple of cables went down into it, disappearing into the dark water to power an immersed pump, and a pipe came out, bringing water.  The electrical panel regulating the pump made a constant clicking noise.  There was no cover, so there were snails and a couple of dead frogs visible on the surface of the water.  Water samples showed coliform bacteria, not a good sign, but not surprising.  Wells generally have a pressure tank—a big steel tank with a balloon of compressed air inside to keep water pressure up—and this had one, though we found out later that the balloon was punctured and full of water.  Surrounding the well house, there were the remains of old piping and an ancient pressure tank.

The line from well to reservoir did not inspire a lot of confidence.  It was PVC pipe, in pretty good condition, but...  It didn’t go straight from the well to the reservoir; rather, it went straight south for a ways, then straight west, so it was much longer than it needed to be.  Normally this would be pretty hard to tell, since normally such pipes are buried to protect them from animals and a freezing environment.  However, this one was still in an open trench for most of its course.  The cable supplying power to the well house was laid in the same trench, except at the dogleg where the pipe turned 90°--apparently, there was not sufficient cable, so it spanned several meters of the hypotenuse, lying exposed on the ground rather than exposed in the trench. 

The reservoir was, if anything, worse.  It’s a giant concrete tank, the top of which is at ground level.  Water comes in the east end, and there is a pump which sends water out the west end.  There is an access port on the top that one can easily fit through.   As purchased, the entire thing was covered by an utterly dilapidated shed; perforated walls, a tin roof that was falling apart, and full of the nests of birds and wasps and hornets.   There was no cover for the access port other than a piece of cardboard that had caved in and gotten soaked.  This made falling in and drowning a hazard, as had been discovered by many frogs, mice, and a squirrel all in various states of waterlogged and anaerobic decay.  Add to this the observation that an owl had taken a liking to perching above the access port and horking up its fewments; perhaps it liked to listen to the plop they made in the cistern. 

The line from the reservoir to the house was not especially inspiring either; this is a chunk of that line from where it actually enters the house.   

The story of the house in one picture

Note the place where a leak in the very rusty pipe had been “repaired” with rags held on by a hose clamp. 

The plumbing inside the house caused a bit of head scratching for our plumber.  There appeared to be a second pressure tank in the basement—but it was just a tank, no pressure.  There was what appeared to be a pressure-boosting pump—but it didn’t do anything when it was turned on.  The line feeding the water heater ran from one end of the house to the other—and then back to the water heater.  An earlier remodel of the house left a lot of abandoned pipe in place—with no covers for the cleanouts.  The hot water smelled of sulfides.  And so on…

The previous owner of the place assured us that the septic tank was in perfectly fine condition; it had been installed “oh, about 20 or 30 years ago” and pumped “not too long ago, should be fine for the two of you for a couple of years,” according to the seller.  The Real Doctor and I were a little skeptical. 

Needless to say, a lot of work has been done in the last year.  Here’s a big shout out to Gilbert Pump and Well Service and Plummer’s Plumbing, not to mention brother H and the Real Doctor.    

I still need to make a new house for the well, but the situation there is much better.  Much bleach went into the well after the corpses came out.  There’s a real cap for the well, so it’s closed up tight.  The clicking noise from the pump controller was a switch that was having its death spasms, causing the pump to constantly cycle on and off, so the pump controller has been replaced.  Needless to say, there’s a new pressure tank too. 

There’s a new water line that makes a straight shot from the well to the reservoir. It’s buried.  The new cable is now in a conduit, also buried. 

Shortly after we bought the place, I had to go to L.A. for a couple of weeks.  During that time, I got a phone call from the Real Doctor; she warned me that she had emptied the reservoir and was going to spend an hour inside it with a bottle of bleach and a stiff brush, and that if I didn’t hear back from her in an hour I should call 911.  Well, she survived, and I’m glad.  We also got a proper riser and lid for the reservoir, and a better pump, and both a cartridge and a UV filter to sterilize everything that comes out of the reservoir.  I also built a new house for the reservoir.  It was my first go at construction, and I am definitely not proud of it at all, but it’s so much better than what was there. 

We’ve replaced bits of the line from the reservoir to the house.  There was the incident when we returned from Claremona to find a bit of our field turned into a marsh by a pipe rupture; uncovering the break gave us this nice image, showing the completed reservoir house to boot. 

Les jeux d'eau a la ville d'Umpqua

Also, the final 20 meters of line were replaced with PEX for better freezing resistance. 

The interior plumbing has all been updated to PEX or PVC, except for a little bit of cast iron.   The pressure pump was discarded.  Another cartridge filter was added.  Simplifying the plumbing system turned up hidden horrors: Brother H. courageously drained the hot water heater, which had a layer of chunky precipitate in the bottom that must have been inches thick, in addition to a large quantity of mysterious gelatinous goo.  The sacrificial anode in the water heater was completely covered in a centimeter-thick layer of scale, leading to its replacement—so now, instead of reducing sulfates in our water to make stinky sulfide, we are reducing magnesium, a big improvement.  That big, mysterious water tank got drained and taken to the dump; when we took it out of the basement, it barfed up a layer of the foulest sludge I’ve ever seen:

Be glad it's not in smell-o-vision

The nephews had great fun rolling it over to the scrap heap.  With every rotation, it would poop out more sludge, making it look like the trail of a cow with diarrhea and hiccups:

Be glad that you don't get the sound effect

Which leads naturally to a discussion of the septic system.

The septic tank is a thousand-gallon concrete crypt, buried a half-foot under the surface of our back yard.  According to the county records, it was installed in 1983.  There’s a pipe leading out of the house, coupled to the tank by a rubber sleeve.  Another pipe connected by a rubber sleeve leads around the side of the house to the drain field in front of our driveway. 

Soil is a fluid, and stuff floats in it, getting driven up and down by buoyancy and traffic.  Sewage pipes, it turns out, tend to be less buoyant that septic tanks.  While the pipe from the house and the septic inlet started at the same level thirty years ago, over time the pipe sank about three inches, distorting the rubber sleeve into an elongated “S” shape.  The pipe is four inches in diameter, so we fixed this just in time.  We were not so lucky with the outlet pipe—when Brother M, and Brother H and his family were all visiting, we discovered that the outlet pipe had sunk by about five inches.  I discovered this because I was in the yard when the Real Doctor was taking a shower, and noticed stinky water oozing up out of the ground.  It took an emergency visit from the honey wagon and some concrete under the outlet pipe to put things right, and we were extraordinarily lucky that (thanks to the construction of the addition) we had a porta-potty on the premises.  Stay tuned, though--there are hints that our septic system may need to be altered to meet code.   

There are still unresolved mysteries in the property’s water situation.  While digging in the yard, we broke a PVC pipe that started gushing water under pressure.  It’s pretty clear that it comes off the main water line; however, I followed it out some ways, and it just ends.  There’s also a spigot—dry, or at the least plugged—way out in the middle of the field, over a hundred meters from anything else.   Pipes from the original system—a gravity-pressured system fed by a tank on a tower in that back of the house—are still buried in the back yard.  But after a year, and gallons of bleach, and two cartridge filters and a UV filter, I’m pretty confident that we have pure, potable, non-stinky water and reasonable wastewater disposal.   

But what of the Tuesday Tool?  It is not, despite its appearances, a scale model of a coliform bacterium so the plumber knows what to look for during inspection.  We are getting some plumbing installed in the addition—a toilet, a sink, and a second shower, with a new standpipe.  When you get your plumbing inspected by the county, you need to pressure test it.  So, you take the covers off of the cleanouts, put these things in, and inflate them with a bicycle pump.  This keeps the water from going into the septic system.  You then go up onto the roof of the house with a hose, and start filling the entire of system of pipes by way of the standpipe.  If there are any leaks—a bad glue job on the PVC, or a crack in the pipe—water will come gushing out of them.  Sure enough, this test revealed a cracked bit of PVC in the new piping, which was easy to replace.  Once that was done, the inspector was satisfied, and we could proceed with confidence that our plumbing was good. 

Anthropic influences in the iron cycle

It's been a busy week here at the farm.  We have borrowed our general contractor's heavy trailer, and we've been making use of it and the strength of a co-worker's son to clear out some of the scrap iron that we purchased when we purchased the property.

We acquired a lot of garbage with our 24 acres.  We have a 3-yard dumpster which we've been filling pretty regularly.  When we had a visit from the local Les Schwab tire franchise to repair a flat tractor tire, we paid them a few hundred dollars to take away over a dozen used tires ranging in size from compact car to truck to tractor.  And then, there were the mountains of scrap metal.

Re-wiring and re-plumbing the house gave us a lot of copper--the old knob-and-tube wiring used 14 ga. copper, much heavier than the current standard, and there was a whole house's worth of the stuff.  There was also yards and yards of copper tubing from the old fuel oil system, a lot of copper sheet from I-don't-know-what, and lots of other copper junk.  Copper gets top dollar for metal recycling.

But, as Stalin remarked, quantity has a quality all its own.  Scrap iron--even "dirty iron" or "scrap/tin," the difficult mix of iron and copper and plastic and rubber and fiberglass represented by a used water heater or a bale of rusty fence wire--will only get you $130 a ton at the recycling places in town.  However, in cleaning up our fields and barns and fences and grounds, we accumulated two giant piles.  According to the receipts from the scrap yards, over the last week we have hauled away nearly five tons of

tin roofing
washing machines
re-bar
water heaters
bits of a Model T truck
plumbing
barbed wire
no-climb fencing
bent T-posts
oil drums
rusted-out troughs
dairy stanchions
tire chains
animal traps
water tanks
bridge supports
rusted-out culverts
mangled gates
bed frames
lumber dryer pipe
...

I still have to cut up the frame of the Model T truck so it will fit in the trailer (that's what the quail in the photo is perching on), but we have taken care of most of it.  The enormous piles of scrap--we've been accumulating them for so long that I've been using them as landmarks--are gone.  There is still about a ton of scrap in the creek below our house, but that will have to wait until next dry season; it is out of sight and for now out of mind.  Right now, I will enjoy the clearer view, and the fact that our property weighs a bit less.

***

This iron-rich scenario is true for many farms--it seems you can't pass a farm without seeing a dead combine or tractor or other rusting hulk.  And of course, being a microbiologist concerned with element cycles and a tree-hugger, it leads me to wonder.  Going in to the last century, most of the world's economically viable iron was still in the ground, concentrated in well defined deposits.  One of the unintentional goals of the last century was to take that concentrated, easily accessible iron and disperse it evenly across the face of the earth.  Getting iron out of the ground is unlikely to get any cheaper.  As it is, the economics of iron are such that people will pay me over a hundred dollars a ton for grotty iron.  They will then spend more money to separate it, put it on a boat, ship it across the Pacific to China, melt, and re-form it into agricultural implements or whatever.  Scrap iron prices fluctuate, but the trend is that they go up.

So, I wonder what it will be like five hundred years from now.  I assume iron will still be useful and valuable.  Where will it come from?  Will the iron cycle have closed on itself, as far as humans are concerned?  Will we still get iron from the ground?  Would the discovery of 4,000 kilos of iron in various oxidation states near a creek in Oregon be an economically significant event, or would it not even be worth fifty quatloos?  I just don't know enough about the geology on this, but it's something I wonder about when I see a fifty year old tractor rusting away in the corner of a field. 

Tuesday Tool Civic Responsibility Edition

Oregon is an exclusively vote-by-mail state, so today's tool is the fountain pen.  It was actually used some time ago, but seems appropriate for today.

The Real Doctor and I went out for a walk this evening, and I wondered which of our neighbors our votes exactly cancelled out.  Probably any one of them; we live in an area that is deeply conservative, and it's no surprise to see road signs about the evils of Agenda 21 and how Obama is destroying America with communism.  I do my darndest to keep discussion away from politics; the contractor working here today failed to do so, and unleashed a violently bitter diatribe about the evils of all politicians from a delivery man.  I think election day has everybody riled up. 

Friday Flora Green Shoots edition

It's officially the rainy season here; it was striking how quickly this came up after the very first rains:

It's rainy, but it's not yet wet.  Digging in the pasture, we found that the soil is moist less than a foot down, and Oak Creek isn't running yet.  It's nice to look out the window and see green.