That would have seemd like more if it were how much water we had available before running out. But instead, it was
50 toilet flushes or
2 loads of laundry or dishes or
5 long showers or
400 shaves and toothbrushings or
some combination of the above after which our basement would start to fill up with raw sewage.
Early in the afternoon on Tuesday, an alarm bell started ringing in the basement. The pump that delivers "household effluent" from the 100-gallon holding tank in the basement to the city sewer main up under the road had stopped working, and there was about 10 inches of free space in the tank. "Minimize water use," said the nice man at the pumping company that had helped us out during the winter.
Wednesday morning the pump truck arrived, and drained enough more-or-less liquid that the service guy could determine that our pump was indeed dead. Replacement time: somewhere between a day and a half and five weeks. For some reason, we decided to go with the off-the-shelf pump rather than the custom-built replacement for the one that had just died.
Our job in the interim: "Minimize water use."
It's amazing what you can do with a dishpan to catch the water in the sink or a wastebasket to scoop it out of the bathtub, and a five-gallon bucket to water some trees you'd just as rather didn't grow anyway. Other uses of water are non-negotiable.
So there we've been, until sometime this afternoon, when the old frighteningly-encrusted pump got hauled out and the new shiny blue one got installed in its place. Brush your teeth, spit in the bucket. Wash some bottles for Charlie, rinse them into the bucket. Good thing the park has outhouses.
And we would have made it too -- ended up with a basement floor entirely unsullied by filth -- if it hadn't been for that little accident with the water main. (Perhaps I should hang a big "NO STEP" sign on those pipes?) The local emergency plumbers did a fine job soldering things back together, though, and I'm sure the shellshock will wear off soon...
Posted by wallich at June 23, 2005 05:31 PM