Thursday, I created my best diversion yet: I brought water down to the guest/boat house.
We’ve done this once before, splicing a tee into our summer water line as it runs along the face of the cliff over our property to bring a hose down to the compost bins. That’s served us well, but it also seemed easier, as we used a garden hose to do that. This new project took a bit more effort and material.
Michelle has dreamed for years of bringing water to the guest house. I’d always worried about the logistics of it, but recently I realized that it would be far easier than it first appeared. I’ve been working toward this for a few days, but weather hasn’t cooperated fully (see Water Work Called on Account of Rain).
The new water diversion for the guest/boat house (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).
Unfortunately, we needed two tries. I went to town for an afternoon play practice, and the tides forced a longer stay than required, so we hustled around, gathering information that would allow me to go to one of our hardware stores for parts. Michelle gave me a small piece of poly pipe to gauge the water line, so the parts would match.
When I got to the store, one of the clerks measured it, and told me it was 1″, so I assembled the gear in that size: a tee, adapters, a gate, hose clamps and 100 feet of pipe. Later, when I realized that we actually needed all of this in 3/4″, Michelle took the list back to the store for replacements. The clerk blamed himself for the error, but, in checking my work, I realized that it was only by coincidence that it had happened that way—it turns out that we have both 3/4″ and 1″ pipe on the homestead. The stray scrap could just have easily been the wrong size, and I wouldn’t have realized it until we started assembly.
At any rate, this only caused a delay of one day. By Thursday, I had everything in the right size. I assembled the gate, tee, and adapters for the diversion, and installed it in short order. Really, the longest part of the job proved guiding the tightly-rolled pipe down the cliff face, through the roots and trees in its path, down to the guest house. The fact that I had to do this on the same steep slope that in the past wiped out our guest outhouse made the job extra ticklish (see Dang! There Goes the Outhouse!).
Running a little water through to check the fittings finished the job for now. We’ll need to figure out what kind of sink we want (part of the criteria will be “secondhand,” but there’ll be more to it than that) and where, exactly to put it. Likely, we’ll install it on the wall of the front porch shelter, so it’s handy to the guest house, but also useful for outdoor access, such as for cleaning fish. We’ll need to create a drain and that sort of thing. We’ve got about 20 feet of pipe in reserve, so that part should come quickly once we’ve decided on a course of action.
It seems as head like this will provide some decent pressure (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).
However, now that the diversion’s in place, we can switch the main cabin from the winter water supply for the summer supply, putting us on track for the coming winter.