But that gave me enough time to get into some pants and move the truck from the driveway where the offending broken pipes were buried.. I spent some time looking for the other valve boxes that were long since grown over with grass.
I found some of them, but the service guy said not to worry, because he has an electronic tool that sniffs out the magnetic valve solenoids, kind of like a metal detector would find a metal piece underground...
The beauty of having these guy that fix this stuff every day come look at the otherwise un-revealing hole in the ground, is that he reached in and wiggled the valve body and said it wasn't connected to anything... So with his shovel he carefully dug around the pipe off to the side of the valve pipe and unearthed the entire problem...
A piece of 1 inch PVC had given way at the elbow... Where it was glued. Or supposed to have been glued.... The purple cleaner hadn't stained the bottom of the joint, meaning that it was never cleaned correctly... So the cement had never adhered to the plastic pipe.... Eventually it was going to blow apart!! It took about 4 years...
Seems that these joints begin to leak, and then build a pocket around the pipe as the water washes away the soil that is holding the pipe together. And when the pressure is strong enough, they blow with a big bang and water everywhere...
It took a while to cut new parts and re glue and seal all the existing pipes.. He replaced everything back to a threaded joint in the valve, where he used new teflon tape... Once the ground was filled back in, all I had to do was wait for 3 hours before turning on the pressure....
Oh, and I have a bill for about an hours work and parts.... $113 and change... Not too bad since my hands never were dirty....
And later this afternoon I have been running each zone of the system checking out the watering patterns and stuff...
The rest of the day has been back on the computer where I learned a valuable lesson about making bootable DVDs.... Microsoft Windows7 will burn an ISO file to a DVD and you can read it and test it and all will look fine......!!!! BUT IT WON'T BOOT UP YOUR COMPUTER!!!!
I could find no reference to this on the internet wiki files..... But after trying everything I could think of, it slowly dawned on me that you have to have an ISO image burner program to burn these.... I knew this from my old days of copying other unmentionable media..... Dah...
So once I downloaded Imageburn, and made a dvd disk with it, we had a bingo as I was able to boot from the DVD drive on both the windows laptop and the linux desktop...
I am trying out another version of linux called Mint.
But it is beyond the nature of this blog, to explain. Other than it is a competing distribution of linux from different folks...... Supposed to be easier, but of course time will have to prove that one....
Anyway I can now happily spray all that expensive water on the parched grass around my home here in KC... Wouldn't it just be easier to rock the whole thing like we did in Mesa??? But that's not socially acceptable here in the mid west.....
Retired Rod
Although I don't mind grass, and certainly like to have a nicely trimmed green lawn, the whole endeavour is just such a huge effort and ultimately, a waste.
ReplyDelete"Rocking over" the whole thing has crossed my mind as well. Probably would get our neighbours going too.
There's no winning.
I like that desert landscaping and so much less work. But you're right - probably would be frowned upon. The bill wasn't bad at all for all that digging and fixing.
ReplyDeleteThe desert landscaping is natural looking in its own setting, but it looks HOT! With changing weather patterns, who knows if the midwest will become desert as well. For now, I think the green grass, plants and trees make everything a bit cooler, or at least it looks cooler. I wish there was more recirculation to the watering systems though, so that there wouldn't be all that waste.
ReplyDeleteI'm impressed with a bill of only $113 for any home visit and repair job - that's pretty darned reasonable.
ReplyDeleteLinux Mint? What next - Juicy Fruit?