In the last month or so I've been really busy. Not even a messed up finger can slow me down. I still don't have complete feeling back in my butchered finger so it makes working on certain things a little hard. But I still get out an do my work.
We bought a new crib for Adri. She wasn't liking being in the bassinet anymore, too small. So I spend a couple hours one afternoon putting together her new crib. She loves it and she is sleeping much better at night now.
Working on the baby's crib
Adri enjoying a nap in her new crib
A much bigger project is I have been slowly but surely removing the evil ficus hedge from the side of my house, behind my pool, between me and the neighbors. It took me five weekends with a gas pruner to knock it down from 12 feet to 3 feet. All in all there are about 18-20 different trees making up this hedge. I recently read a blog that states ficus make the worst hedges out there. They use ficus because they are cheap and grow fast, but they are the most expensive in the long run due to maintenance or the cost associated with tearing them out. Anyways I've got it down pretty short so now I just need a chainsaw to finish it up. I'm going to have to dig out the stump and cut the roots with a chainsaw. Fun stuff. Once that is done I am going to put some lobster claw heliconias, another variety of heliconias, and peace lilies as my hedge. Will look so much better, tropical, and will take so much less maintenance. I figure it's going to take another 15-20 hours to complete the tear out. Still a lot of work to go, but the neighbors are already happy to see it knocked down short, they hate it as much as I do.
As if that wasn't keeping me busy enough my sprinkler pump took a dive about six weeks ago. Lucky for me it died at a time when it was raining a lot, about 5 inches in a week. It has taken several trips to Home Depot to get this fixed because their employees are morons and don't know what they are saying. My pump was so badly rusted I had to use a mallet to take it apart so I could get my electrical out of it. And of course the hardest part of working on this pump was dealing with the fact that I didn't have complete feeling back in my finger. Makes it so much harder to do this kind of work.
After replacing the pump and getting it primed my pressure was good, the best it's ever been and my yard got dumped with 18,000 gallons of water. I was pretty excited about the results and how much money I saved doing it myself. Four hours later I turned it on again and it worked so I thought it was complete. Wrong. The next morning the pump had lost it's prime. So I replaced some of my suction line as well and my foot valve and check valves in the canal. The check valve had been on land previously which is not correct and the pipe was shoved really low into the canal and held there by cheap twine. I put the pipe about 7 feet into the canal and I put a floating goose over it so it floats 15 inches below the water line.
After doing things the right way I still wasn't able to get my pump to hold prime so I was getting very frustrated. The worst part is that the line is not pressurized and the leak was very slow so it makes it hard to find the problem. I have to fix one thing, prime it up, and wait a day to see if it works. I can't just do a repair and test so it's very time consuming. I had to do a lot of trenching looking for air leaks and I was starting to think I would never find the leak. The only leaks I could find were on the feeder lines, not the suction line so that wouldn't make any sense of why it would lose prime. I actually found a pretty big one of the feeder line last Wednesday and I fixed it on Friday. Well Friday night I finally found the problem. I dug up about 8-9 feet from the canal and instead of using normal schedule 40 pvc they had s&w pipe with the bells on the end and the bell was cracked, the glue was bad, and it was leaking water and air. I fixed that and sure enough the next day the prime had held. What a relief. So after a good 15-20 hours of work, my irrigation is finally all fixed up.
My old sprinkler pump. This thing was beat up.
The new pump
Old section of suction pipe
New and improved section of suction pipe
New foot valve on top and old foot valve on bottom. As you can see my new foot valve is much bigger and the check valve is only a little over a foot away from it so it will be underwater as well.
Close up of the new foot valve
1 comment:
There's always a project when you have a house! Cool ceiling fans.
Post a Comment