Friday 3 October 2008

water worries and the red menace

Most people get their water from a municipal system, but here on the farm we have to rely on our rain water tanks.

So you can imagine my discomfort when one of the water tanks had moved on its sand bed and was leaking; it had turned communist and decided to lean radically to the left.

This was a major blow in this true blue water-starved National Party enclave.
Action had to be taken. After all, if our new Mayor had known of the incident we would be of his Christmas card list.

The problem was how to use the water as quickly as possible and re-orientate the Trotskyist tank before further mishap occurred.

A quick look around the sheds threw up a possible solution. If the errant tank was spliced into the main house water lines then we could turn off the header tank and use the water in the house thereby gaining the maximum value from this precious resource.

So with hacksaw and pipe fittings in hand I sallied forth only to discover a trench had to be dug to place the connector pipe at the correct level.

Back to the shed, then with shovel, mattock and a sense of destiny I returned to the scene of the crime. With a few hours of sweat and swearing the trench was complete.

It did not take long to do the necessary surgery to connect the tank to the main house line, now was the moment of truth - would our old Chinese made pressure pump be up to the task of controlling pressure from this new addition to the tank family?

This is when the true nature of the communist conspiracy became obvious.
The pressure pump was so excited that it finally had an ally that it refused to stop pumping even when no water was needed in the house.

The pump continues to sing of the death of capitalism regardless of how I turn the regulator valve.

Now I’m sitting on the veranda having a well earned ale and thinking that with a little more co-operation the system could work, but how do you get the different components to talk to one another and what would be the outcome if they would co-operate?

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