I took Friday off and we went up to Casco on Thursday evening. Partly it was because I had vacation days I had to use up in this year, and partly so we could be there to have our oil burner serviced. When the water failed last weekend, we figured that it was good that we were going to be there so we could have the well people over today, too.
The oil burner guy was about my age and size. He didn’t mind my watching him work, changing the filter on the oil tank, cleaning off the nozzle and igniter of the furnace and water heater oil burners, and showing me how to reset both of them. I’ve seen signs in garages that say things like “labor rate, $15 an hour, if you watch $20 an hour, if you help, $25” so I wasn’t sure he’d want me around, but he said he had taught in vocational schools and was used to people watching him work and he liked to explain what he was doing. Besides telling me lots about oil burner maintenance, he talked about hockey, northern Maine (“the county” being Aroostook county, way north, where you expect the temperature to be 30 below zero when you get up at 5 in the morning to get your friend’s sled team ready for a competition), and his travels around the Canadian maritime provinces.
The first and most senior of the guys from Burton Page Artesian Wells came over around 9 in the morning, swapped in a new capacitor and motor controller box, and determined that that wasn’t the problem after all. That meant they were going to have to pull up the pump. His crew was a couple of towns away on a job that didn’t have to be done right away and wouldn’t be finished today anyway, so he had them bring that to a good stopping point and come over to fix our well.
They showed up mid-afternoon with two trucks. They backed one of them over our front yard, raised the tower, and pulled the pump up.
The well pump is 600 feet under ground, with a long plastic pipe and electric cord leading to it. It gets pulled up on a big hose reel suspended from the derrick on the back of the truck. The pump motor itself weighs ten or fifteen pounds, the pump three times that, and then there’s six hundred feet of plastic pipe full of water; so you don’t want to pull that up by hand.
Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera along. All I could do to show you the proceedings was to take a picture with my camera phone.
It took a while to pull up those 600 feet of pipe! Finally the pump and motor came out of the ground. The repairmen took the motor off the pump, tried to turn the gear at the top and found it wouldn’t move, and said, “Yup, that’s the problem.” They swapped in a new motor, tightened all the connections, and unreeled the pipe and wire to let the pump back down the well.
But wait, you ask, how does the water get from that pipe to the house? The connection is about five feet under grade level, below the frost line, that is, deep enough underground that it won’t freeze. There’s a fitting at the top of the pipe from the well that drops into a fitting connected to the pipe to the house. The well guys connected a ten-foot iron pipe to the fitting on the well pipe, held a flashlight to shine down the well, and guided the well pipe down to where the two fittings matched. When it was done I said, “That looked to me like the step where everything could go wrong.” It was just the guy holding that iron pipe that was holding all the pipe from the well. If he had dropped the iron pipe, I don’t know what would have kept it from going all 600 feet down. But he’s done it before, and it was OK.
I tell you, it was pretty strange see that brand-new pump motor I had just bought go down the well. The wellhead is only fifty feet from the house, but that motor is going six hundred feet away. With a little luck, I’ll never see it again.
The phone listing we have for the well company is “Burton Page Artesian Wells, Dale Page”. It was Dale who had come over earlier in the morning. I asked the guy who seemed to be in charge of this crew if he was Burton. He said, “No, that’s my grandfather.” Dale was his father. That’s three generations of well guys, and the teenage or 20-something kid who was the third person on this crew is a fourth generation.
I drove back to Newton this evening to go to a potluck party from where I used to work.