Water, please.

Have you ever woken up in the morning and within five minutes you realize the day isn't going to go as planned?  After getting out of bed the other morning I tried to turn the water on only to find there wasn't any water coming out.

The first thought was that a pipe had frozen.  Nope, not cold enough.  The Breaker was flipped. No, not that either.  After further investigation it was decided it was the worst option yet...our well's water pump had malfunctioned.  Who to call now?  We never had any well issues before.  Thank goodness for Google.

Luckily we found a well company that could get out here quickly.  They assessed the situation and also decided it was the water pump.

We learned that our water pump is 600 feet below ground.  Do you know what that means?  No, I didn't either, but now I do.  They have to pull out 600 feet of pipe in 20 foot sections.  Hence the tall pulley thing on the truck.

This was a lengthy process.  They had estimated six hours for the whole project.  It was a cold day too.  My sweet hubby stayed out there with them most of the time.  He said he learned a lot, but nearly froze to death.

There it is...that silver canister looking thing was our water pump.  It was a bigger model than they expected so Irv jumped in our truck with them to go back and get a bigger model from their office.  $$$$

They came back, put the new pump down the hole, put all that pipe back down the hole and then guess what...it didn't work.  Do you know what happens next?  Yep, the whole thing has to come back out section by section.  

It turned out to be a short in the wiring.  They offered to put the old pump back in.  After some discussion and some Googling we (mostly me) decided to go ahead with the new pump.  We learned our pump had already passed its life expectancy.  I'm not a fan of emergency situations so I thought as long as they were out there they may as well install a new one.  My better half, on the other hand, wanted to see how many more years we could get out of the old one.   

So everything went back down the hole one piece at a time.  Then it fired right up.  Then began the process of flushing the lines and getting our water back to being clear.  They rolled out of here around 8:00 p.m.

They said we would be billed for two "pulls" since everything had to be done twice.  No, no, no I don't think so.  We called the experts because we don't know a damn thing about water wells.  It's not our fault that they didn't check for the simplest solution first.  When Irv brought this to their attention, they agreed.  We've yet to see the bill so hopefully there won't be any trouble.

Needless to say, our day didn't go as planned and we will soon be a few thousand dollars poorer, but hey, we have a brand new water pump!