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Camp Chef Product to the Rescue
By GP | March 10, 2010
When it rains…. it pours….or when it’s cold in Cache Valley it freezes. It has been a long cold winter. About 80 percent of annual snow fall but just feels long and colder than usual.
Maybe it is because I’ve been home bound and the meds make me more sensitive to cold I don’t know but I’m ready for spring!
At 2:00 a.m. I heard our lift pump go off in the basement. Two minutes later it went off again. No….sure enough something was amiss. When I built the home I couldn’t get anyone to give me the kind of information I felt comfortable with in regards to the water table. It was fairly high but I was on a good fall which kept water moving and not standing. I should have only gone two feet in the ground but at the request of a neighbor to make the neighborhood look consistent I went four…..mistake. But I rested the foundation on pea gravel under the floor and around the foundation. Inside it I put corrugated pipe so I could catch all the ground water and keep it on the move out to a sump pump.
I’ve gotten away with it for 16 years. But we changed our farming a bit and the ditch from the outlet to the pond wasn’t quite the same and this caused the water to stand a bit more. Sure enough the outlet pipe was frozen solid. I got the 17 year old boy up and sent him for the propane tank. I used my summer water tank upside down over it to trap the heat in hopes of thawing it out. I could hear the pump grinding away. An hour later we removed the trough and cleaned away as much ground as was thawed exposing the plastic pipe. Again I set the single burner stove under the trough but this time on it’s side to help keep the flame closer to the ground and use the burner housing to repel some heat off the plastic tank. Thirty minutes later I checked it and she’d broken loose and water was pouring over top of my favorite single burner stove. It was no worse for wear and I was relieved that the operation didn’t require a back hoe.
My lift pump for septic in the basement takes on some ground water if the sump is off or out. That is a bit of an alarm to alert me to water issues. Camp Chef saved me from boating in the basement. Just a different kind of emergency and was I glad I had it.
Topics: GP, General Discussion | No Comments »