Water, Water, Everywhere...

Starting in late fall 2016 and continuing until May 2017, the system experienced a couple of significant leaks that consumed a good deal of volunteer time and required considerable sleuthing to track down.  You would think that such volumes of water would be easy to follow to their source, but such was not the case. The story unfolded this way...

Late in the fall of 2016, it was noticed that the reservoir level was dropping more than would normally be expected, given the time of year.  Obviously, a leak.  But where was it?  We wandered the route of the main line, we wandered around the different properties, we checked consumption at water meters, but we still couldn't figure out where the water was going.  One complicating factor was the amount of snow we had that winter.  Feet of it, making it nearly impossible to see wet ground, not to mention the thought of digging holes to fix anything.

Then, one day in mid-March, as I was spending some time wandering around, wondering where the leak (or leaks....) were, I happened to open a curb-side meter box and what to my wondering eyes did appear but a foot or two of water in what should have been a dry hole.

Unfortunately, this was only days before I was leaving for 6 weeks in Europe, and there was still snow around....  We decided to wait.

One practice we had been following was to turn off the water to the west and lower part of the subdivision at night, in the desire to lose less water.  We'd been doing this every night between 9 pm and 6 am.  We decided to keep that up for another 6 weeks.  Later in April, we set to work.

Once we started digging, the leak became apparent pretty quickly.  What's amazing is how much water can disappear through a relatively small hole.  And that's all it was.  A piece of copper pipe with a small hole right at a fitting.  A few hours of work and that was fixed.

Observation over the following few days indicated that our problems hadn't been solved.  Large volumes of water were still going somewhere.

By early May, we had determined that at least some of it was going to one particular property, one which had, initially unknown to us, started a medical marijuana grow operation, using large amounts of water for cooling purposes.  In mid-May, we decided to install a second water meter near the shutoff valve at the edge of the property.  Just as we were preparing to dig that hole, I received a call from a neighbour on the adjoining property.  Were there springs in the area, she wanted to know.

So the next day, after we excavated for the additional water meter, we dug a small hole along the side of the house where the "spring" seemed to be, and found a break in a waterline.  An hour later and it was fixed.

Our problems weren't over, as the next post will explain.