How clean is your water?

This weekend Home Depot offered a "free water testing" to anyone who brought in 5 oz. of their water. Of course, the testing was sponsored by Kinetico Water Systems so you had to be prepared to hear the very minimal sales pitch about their water filtering system.

We found out that our water has a PH of 7.3 which is on the alkaline side of fabulous (according to the man this will be great for my skin). We have 0 iron and 0 chlorine (awesome!) and our hardness is at 4. This is the only thing that concerns me as every house we have lived in in the Pacific Northwest has PLAGUED me with the calcium spots on the shower doors, curtains, everything. But that's okay, we have time to fix that.

What I most wanted to share was the Consumer Reports printout they provided rating different water filter system. Some of these things I have never heard of, who knew there were so many options? I will definitely be researching further before purchasing!

How to save money on your well

Before you can get your building permit you have to have three things. 1) Electricity, 2) Running Water and 3) Septic. We took care of electricity a few weeks ago and the septic system has been designed, happily we celebrated today with water. Yep, that's right ... good, clean, cold water right out of the ground.

We had a professional drill the well as they don't exactly rent out well-drilling rigs to novices. He hit water at 15 feet and dropped the casing down to 90 feet. When you start sucking water out it draws down, but it steadies at a certain level (which for us is at 40 feet) so this set-up will ensure we never are without water.

One of the biggest ways we saved money with our well was to do the trenching and installation of the pump ourselves. For those who don't know, the well head is just a piece of pipe sticking out of the ground. There is water pipe and power running underground from your well head to your control box and then from your control box to your power source. As Mr. Nick is an expert trencher (ref: Conduit Loop Line) this was not a big deal for us.

Here is our well-head. Notice the pitless adaptor at the bottom and the
pipe running to the control box through Mr. Nick's series of trenches.

The other way we saved money is by installing all the components of the well ourselves. You have to have some knowledge of electrical and some knowledge of plumbing to make this happen but for us we were able to make it work.

These components included:

• Pitless Adaptor
• Pipe
• Electrical
• Pressure Tank
• Pump
• Control Box

Here is our control box

Mythbusting: It's nearly impossible to move a recorded well site.

Nick went to the County yesterday and got great news about moving the well. That was one myth worth busting. I'm not sure where the rumor got started that moving a well was hard, as our well driller seemed to be pretty adamant about it being an "act of congress" but it's good to know that we can move it!

Rain rain, go away...but only when you're ready

We met with our well driller last night to finalize the spot for our well and, much to our dismay, have to put the drilling on hold until we go through one week of solid sun and can project another week after that.

When the company parceled the five plots in our development they chose the well sites based on paper boundaries and not what made sense based on grading of the land or placement of trees. Unfortunately for us this site happens to be in the middle of our "front forest". We lucked out in that we won't lose any trees to prepare the area (it's not as heavily treed as the "back forest") but we didn't luck out in the super steep decline into the front.

We have three options: 1. Bring in truckloads and truckloads of gravel in order to "pave" a good path for the rigs 2. Move the well site or 3. Wait for the sun. The idea of bringing in gravel to blanket our ground is not appealing to us and according to our well driller moving a well site is an act of congress (although he's checking on it today). As far as we're concerned the choice is easy...we're Pacific Northwesterners...waiting for the sun is what we do best!

But, until it comes we're not going to wish our lives away. Spring in Washington is one of my favorite times of year, the trees finally have their color back but because of the constant rain showers everything takes on a misty sheen. Standing in the middle of the tree roots and Jurassic ferns last night, soaking wet and just a little chilly, I fell in love with the moodiness of our land.

So Mr. Sun, take your time...but we're ready for you when you do decide to come out!