Our Christmas Water and Furnace Disaster

Look what happened at the cabin over Christmas; our water disaster.  Two days before Christmas day at 8pm I remembered I’d thrown a bag of trash out on the front porch that needed to be burned. It was dark outside, and I knew a critter would get into the trash and track it all across the yard making a big mess if I didn’t take care of it.

So off I went with flashlight in one hand and the trash and lighter in the other.  I added the garbage to the burning barrel, ignited the lighter, and heard a hissing noise. My first thought was a predator was down at the pond attacking the ducks and they were hissing defending themselves.

I quickly directed the flashlight towards the pond and the light caught the wellhead on the way by and it looked like a fountain spraying up from the ground.  I ran inside and got hubby to come out and see what I’d discovered.

Because it was dark he had to drive his truck across the front yard and use the headlights of his truck for light while he took the well apart to see what was going on.  Of course it was cold, dark, and wet but he had no choice it had to be fixed.

The next day he unloaded the excavator and started digging up the well (I’m thankful we have the equipment to do all this, and hubby can fix anything).  It was only a $6 fix, a connector was so corroded due to all the rust in our water that it started leaking and needed to be replace.

It was an easy fix but without the manpower and heavy equipment it would have been an expensive fix, and over Christmas most contractors wouldn’t have responded.  We shut down our water; it’s also the source that runs our geothermal heat and when we started the furnace back up; nothing.

The furnace didn’t fire….now what.  Hubby worked on it the remainder of the day, mind you we have no heat while this is going on, with no success so he filled the coil with a cleaning agent and let it set overnight.

Praise the Lord, the furnace came back to life the next morning. Something must have been lodged in the coil from shutting off the water and forced it to plug the furnace when the water was turned back on. So we had heat and water for Christmas day.

I don’t know what I’d do without a hubby that can do anything, and fix anything. We save tons of money with him being able to do all he does.  Since all of this we’ve ordered a gas furnace to add to our geothermal unit; we will now have options for heat, geothermal, electric, or gas. So if one goes down we have two other backups.