Friday. Dudette has her car back so I am not needed as a driver today. But I do have the sprinkler system to mess with.
Off to the sprinkler system supply place for those fancy wire nuts.
Good NIGHT!! Are they proud of those wire nuts. I came home with less than 50 wire nuts, in two different sizes and coughed up close to $35 for them. But that is what it is going to take to fix this so I don't need to keep chasing bad connections every year.
While out, I stopped by the local City Hall to drop off the back-flow certification. Seems our City Hall is the only one around that WON'T let the companies submit the certificate on-line. Whatever. I stopped in and immediately put them in brain-freeze mode. Everyone went from zero to stupid in under 3 seconds.
I felt like I was in a special-ed. class. There was this weird echo every time I talked.
me: "I'm here to drop off my certificate." them:"You're here to drop off your certificate?"
me: "For my back-flow preventer." them: "For you're back-flow preventer?"
me: "To comply with city ordinance..." them: "To comply with city ordinance?"
me: "YADA YADA YADA...required by city ordinance...YADA YADA YADA...gotta drop off copy...pay money...this office...comprende kimosabi?"
them: "uh....lemme check...uh"
I was waiting for drool to start puddling up on the desk. Finally a brain-fart happened and broke the vapor lock.
"Oh, alright. Got it. What's the address?" I gave it. "Are you sure you live in the city limits?"
"Uh, huh. For 16+ years."
"Do you get a water bill from us? Or from XXXXXXX?"
"Been paying you guys for 16+ years."
"You sure?"
"YES." I almost had to SPELL the address and the name of the street. "But hey. If you don't want the certificate or the money. Fine by me." And I acted like I was going to leave. That got them.
"No, wait. Found you. Let me make a copy and collect the money and it'll all be done."
I politely told the person behind the counter that next year, I would wait for them to send me a letter asking for it. After all, the mail moved quicker than this transaction did.
By the time I got home, it had started raining again. I didn't care. I was fixing the sprinkler system anyway. Might cool me off.
When I started looking for the loss of current to the valves, I picked the valve closest to where I was working, and turned the timer on to activate that valve. Once I got back to the valve box, I laid down and took off the old nuts and started tapping the wires before hooking them up to my meter. Sure enough, knocked enough corrosion off that I could hear the valve clicking. But I wasn't getting any flow.
Got a screwdriver and went back in the box. I figured I would turn the valve on manually and see if the valve was just stuck. Valve on, no water. Now what? If I have water, it should be flowing through.
When I got up to scratch my head on that one, I noticed the water was turned off at the back-flow valve. The tech had to turn it off to check it, but never turned it back on. Well, duh. That's easy to fix. Turned the water on and got back in the box.
Laying down again, with my face and arms in the box, I find the two wires I've been playing with and tapped them together again. Yup, hear the valve clicking. Good. Grab a new wire nut and twist the wires together to put the nut on. Then, I hear this weird noise.
I looked up from the box and watched this periscope pop up from the ground less than 18 inches from my face. Uh, huh. You guessed it. Sprinkler head.
Before I could blink, I got a face full of water. And it wasn't stopping. I rolled over and up to my feet and headed for the timer. Simple things screw us up, don't they?
But now I knew it was a circuit issue. And, I got lucky. First place I looked was the common wire bundle, and that was the point where we're losing the connections to the valves. Cleaned that up and put the new wire nut on. TAA-DAA!! We had water. All I had left to do was replace the rest of them and I was done.
I liked that.
From there, I went in and cleaned the house. I won't bore you with the details of that.
Projects are still happening.
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