water woes

Monday night Rudee turned on the kitchen faucet and nothing happened. Oh oh!

We had just gotten a delivery so I knew we had a full tank of water on our service trailer so we must have another problem. I went out to the trailer to see of I could figure it out mumbling something to myself about these things always happening at night and not during daylight when you could see! I did remember to take my flashlight and portable radio so I could see a little and also talk to Rudee.

The water pump is a 12 volt RV pump and is inside the generator cabinet. Power is supplied by clipped on wires to the generator battery posts. I wiggled the power wires and could hear the pump start up. I called Rudee and she confirmed that the water came back on. I figured it was too dark to do anymore trouble shooting so I closed the cabinet back up figuring I would check it after daylight.

Tuesday morning the water ran fine for Rudee's shower but stopped again shortly afterwards so I put on my "mud boots" and headed out. I could jiggle the wires and get the pump to run so knew it had to have a loose connection somewhere so started tracing the wires and found the connection for the 12v power at the pump was burnt. I did have some similar connectors in my tool box so I cut the bad one off and replaced it. Once that was done we had water again but I could still wiggle the wire and it would go on and off so it had to be a bad connection on the pump itself.

I came back in and put a call into our service guy Hunter who said he would be here in a couple of hours with a new pump.

Sure enough Hunter showed up right on time and it only took him about 5 minutes to swap out the pumps.

We are back in business and this pump seems to have more pressure than the old one. I think we may have had some issues with it for longer than we thought.

The gate has continued to slow down. They did light the "birthday candle" which means they are getting oil and natural gas and less water from the well now. Sure enough the water truck traffic slowed to just a couple of loads per day and will probably stop in the next day or two. We do anticipate a few crude oil trucks to arrive to haul away the oil being pumped out. Last time at the front well they only ran a few loads per day so we still wont be "swamped" with business :-). I'll keep you posted.