Have you ever had a list of things you wanted to get done for the week, and at the end of the week nothing off it is done? Well that was kind of our week!
In the front yard near the main water line into the house, we started seeing a puddle of water. We had this happen about a month prior and fixed a failed PVC joint downstream of the lawn sprinkler shut-off valve. This wasn’t that big of a deal. This time we figured it was something similar and not serious, so we just left it for a couple of weeks due to other priorities.
Before we get started, this area of the leak has a total of 8 shut-off valves, 2 lawn sprinkler solenoid valves and a double check valve Greg had installed years ago and covered up with 3 stacked valve boxes. This situation makes it less than ideal to make repairs. He started to dig in, literally. Greg first started off by hand pumping 75 gallons of water out of the hole to get to the partially mud-covered valves. After digging thick mud out from around the valves while nearly upside down on his head, he found one of the brass valves had a split in the body. This valve was very close to the edges of one of the double-stacked valve boxes. This meant that Greg would have to remove all three double-stacked valve boxes to gain access. At the time, he would have rather done nearly anything else but this. However, he started digging. In the nine hours he spent in the hole, he hand-pumped about 250 gallons of water out and removed about a yard of mud using the combination of 1 small shovel and a hand trowel. In doing so, he found two more failed PVC glue joints and a pin hole in another brass valve. As problems got worse and worse, we needed cut nearly everything out and rebuild the complex zone valve system. Water had to be turned off for hours at the well house that turns off water to our neighbors as well. By the end of the day, repairs were finally complete, but a huge hole and big pile of dirt remained in the front yard. Then family came to town for a few days which left the project unfinished.
After some brainstorming, Greg decided to custom build a single 4’x4’x2.5’ vault around the whole valve zone. This required him and a farm had to spend a day pre-building a large heavy box, lower it into the hole, and infill from the inside around all of the pipes. With a lid on, they packed soil around the sides, loaded the rest into a trailer, cleaned up and planted grass seed. This project was not a fun one, but it needed to be done.
With all that said, not a lot of farm projects got done except the critical normal things. We can now get back to work. Cheers to that!
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