Fraser River Tides

In our nightly dog walks along the dyke that separates Richmond from the flooding by the Fraser River, we've noted a particular marker that helps us figure out just how low or high the tide is. Here's High tide, looking vaguely northwest from a particular point on the dyke:

And here is a photo taken from nearby, but looking northeast at a low tide:

That stump goes from almost submerged to full exposed, and if you look closely you can see the water's edge way out beyond.

This is a closeup of that stump:

I think it's somewhere between 4 and 6 feet tall (I haven't clambered down there to get a better estimate) and as you can see the tide goes well out beyond it at times. A particular tide tracking website tells me that the maximum tidal swing here is 5.06 meters (or 16.6 feet), and it's pretty impressive. Those photos are not taken at those absolute maximum swings, though, just a couple of times when we've noted it's been particularly high and low.

When the big one hits at high tide, Much of Richmond will have a foot or two of water in their homes, including the house we are renting. That's assuming the ground doesn't liquefy and all the houses come down, which is what I actually expect to happen.

A New Rain Year Dawns

Here in California - or at least the bay area - we track our rain annually from July 1 through June 30. That's because our rainy season falls in the winter and spans the new year. If you are trying to figure out how much water the farmers, watershed, reservoirs, and/or water table is going to get, you need to track it around when it falls, rather than splitting it across an artificial date like January first.

So, July 1 marks the start of the 2012-2013 rain year, and the end of our 20th year of collecting rain data at our home.

This year I tested a bunch of rain gauges, and have revised the way I record and display data. I'll write another post about the rain gauges shortly, but first, here are links to the data I have available:

• Annual Rainfall Totals - going back to the 1992-1993 rain year
• Daily Rainfall Amounts - starting with the 2011-2012 rain year

Those pages hosted on my personal web site, where it is easier to make this work than here on Blogger, where column widths make displaying this stuff something of a challenge.

I will provide links to those pages in the right side navigation bar as well, so you can find them in the future without having to find this post.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions from the data. I stress, though, that rain fall amounts vary widely over even small distances, and we have nothing like a statistically valid sample to analyze anything over the long term. We use this data mostly to try and assess how our well will perform over the coming year. If we have less rainfall we can bet we'll our well will low on water before the next rain year gets going and the aquifer can be recharged.

Another thing this data helps us understand is our local fire danger. Rainfall that is well spread out in time keeps the vegetation moist and thus less likely to be a problem. 2011/2012 was the first time I recorded actual rainfall amounts by the day and kept them, so we still have a lot to learn here.

I hope this data is interesting and useful to someone other than me.

When A Well Pump Dies - Part 2

Sorry... just realized I never told people what happened with the pump.

About $1200 and several days later we had a working well again.  (Those of you who think that owning your own well is an inexpensive proposition should consider that number carefully before committing to it.  Well maintenance is not cheap.)

The best guess at the problem is that the slime (seen in the pictures from the earlier post) built up on the pump to the point that it loaded down the motor.   That might make more sense if you understand something about how at least some well pump controllers work:

• A float switch in the tank indicates that the tank needs water.  (Our tanks are big - 5000 gallons each - and in theory it takes a bit of a drop before the float switch says the level is low.  In parts of the country with colder weather they don't use storage tanks, but they'd better have good wells that can keep up with demand in that case.)
• The pump controller turns the pump on via a relay.
• The pump controller monitors the current drawn by the pump, which starts at one value and changes substantially when the pump runs the well dry.  When that happens, the pump is no longer under load, the controller detects it, and turns it off.
• Alternately, if you have a good well, the float switch hits the high water mark in the tank and the controller turns the pump off for that reason.

There are other complications, of course, like a timer to let the well recover before the pump is turned on again, but they don't really matter for the purposes of this discussion.

In our case it appears that the slime on the pump made it look as if it was under load - and moving water - even when it had pumped the well dry.  That meant the controller didn't turn the pump off, and since the water is the coolant for the pump, it wound up getting really hot and melting the pipe as previously documented.

The fix mostly involved cleaning the pump.  They bench tested it and found it was still OK, which is good and saved us a lot of money.  We also installed 40' of stainless steel pipe just above the pump to add more heat sink should this ever happen again.

I also get to put chlorine (in the form of bleach) down the well a couple of times a year now to kill off the bacterial slime that builds up and (hopefully) avoid this in the future that way too.

Such fun.  But we have a working well again, and the power bills are back to normal.  (Well, they were back to normal, but then a technician misread our old analog meter while installing a new smart meter, and I'm having PG&E look into that mess, but life moves on.)

May your water always flow.

When A Well Pump Dies - Part I

Apparently our well pump stopped working a few weeks back.  It takes a while to notice this, though, at least for us.  I have to note the water level in the storage tank dropping.  Also, in this case, and elevated PG&E bill was a giveaway too, though I didn't know that at the time it arrived.

I called our preferred well guy and had him do some diagnosis.  I had already verified that we had power getting to the top of the well and that the pump should have been running, but no water was coming out.  He was able to duplicate my results and noted that the current flowing in the wires meant the pump was probably running.  He bypassed the pump controller and the problem continued, so whatever the issue was it was in the well pump, 380 feet below ground.  Oh joy.

Today he came back with his truck to pull the pump and find out what was going on.  These pictures document that little voyage of discovery.

First, here's what the well head looked like before things got started:

The line on the right (with the gray box) is the electrical supply that drives the pump.  The line in the middle going into the ground is the water discharge.  That goes off to our storage tanks.  The strange looking plastic pipe on the left is a home made sulfur discharge vent, since the old metal one corroded and goobered up the threads it was screwed into.  The first 50 feet of the well is surrounded by concrete to keep ground water from contaminating the well.  Most of that 50 feet has only a couple of inches around it, but the cap has a much wider pad to protect the well head from lawn mowers and the like.

And here we see what it looks like with the well seal opened up and the first couple of feet of pipe extracted:

The electrical was disconnected, the sulfur vent removed, and the union in the water line opened up.  At this point all 380 feet of pipe are hanging from a cable on a truck designed for this purpose.  It looks like this:

That picture was taken a bit later.  You can see a 20' length of schedule 80 PVC pipe hanging from the rig.  The pipes are threaded and attached with brass couplings.  An odd looking device is used to clamp the pipe in place while the section above is disconnected and set aside.  Here's a closer view of that:

The metal thing sitting crosswise at the bottom is the above mentioned clamp.  The technician is using the lift to pull the pipe up.  His assistant is pulling the electrical wires and a safety rope off to the side to keep them out of the way.  (Note that those wires and rope are taped to the pipe at regular intervals, so the tape has to be cut and removed as each pipe is pulled up too.)  Also as the pipe comes up the technician wipes the accumulated slime off of it.  And in our case there is a lot of that slime.  Some combination of iron and sulfur bacteria make for a nasty thick layer of gunk all over everything.  (And there will be a better picture of that later.)

As the end of the 19th section of pipe comes out of the ground, we see the well pump emerge, and just before that, a surprise:

OK... this may not look like much to the uninitiated but that's bad.  Most of the PVC pipe above the pump is 1" diameter.  The last two sections are 1.25" for some technical reason, but they do NOT bow out like that.  That's bad.  That's very bad.

What it means is that sometime a month or more ago the pump ran, pumped all the water out of the well, but then did not turn off.  As it kept running it got hot, since water is the usual coolant for the motor.  As the pump got hot it heated the pipe above the pump got too, and the plastic softened.  Eventually it got so hot - despite there being water inside the pipe - that a hole opened up in the pipe and the water drained out.

So that bowed out area just above the pump is a bad thing.  It means that something is wrong with the pump, the pump controller, or both.  Now, as it happens, we had a long brownout or two just over a month ago during a big wind storm.  For one of them I was home and awake and ran around turning off breakers, though I honestly don't remember if I got the breaker for the well pump or not.  I should have, but who knows.  The other brownout, if it affected us, hit while I was asleep, or so I gather from a neighbor.  The first was something like 20 minutes long and I have no idea about the other, but either might have caused a fault that could result in this sort of behavior.

Or there might be other causes.  Time will tell.

Here's a picture of the entire well pump sitting on the pad around the well:

The top half is the impeller, the bottom half is the motor.  Water enters through the grid in the middle and we can see that isn't too blocked up.

Here's a closer view of the slime from the well and the bottom of the pump.  I hope you haven't eaten recently:

Yeah.  Sorry about that.

And finally, here's the pipe from the well laid out ready to go back in once the problem is fully diagnosed:

The bulge in the last pipe is pretty obvious there.  The large, black, football shaped thing two pipes over from the left is a torque arrestor, to keep the pipes from twisting and banging around when the motor kicks in.  It fits just inside the six inch plastic pipe that lines the well.

My well guy took the pump and controller off with him today.  He will clean up the pump, bench test it all, and find the problem.  If the controller is bad he will replace it.  In addition - since this is the second time we've seen that pipe bulge up due to a hot pump - he may replace the last 20' section of PVC with stainless steel, to reduce the chances of that happening again.  (Of course, if it does happen the stainless will conduct heat better, and it might just move the problem, or it might cause the pump to burn out once it has run too long.)

Hopefully tomorrow he will be able to tell me exactly what failed, and we can start looking to avoid the root cause of the problem.  That may mean trying to find some way to protect our entire home from brownouts.  We already have a whole house surge protector installed, but nothing keeps a brownout from crippling us.

More when we know it.  Whee.