trial runs

There are some good things that can come out of losing your house.

For one thing, you end up doing trial runs of your off-grid backup systems. The waterless (bucket/portage) toilets have already been mentioned: work great, no problem.

The spring-fed water system at the bnb is another good example. The spring involved is, most of the time, very small, and the rest of the time it's very VERY small. Like, a pint a minute flow. Really.

With such a low flow rate, we have to catch it all. And if there are any hiccups in the system, we need to discover them right away. So when we ran out of water last Thursday, we knew we'd fallen asleep on the job. Because there were five count-'em-five breaches in the delivery hose (three from deer strike, two from something with sharp teeth and the impulse to chew plastic), with a consequent loss of flow. Only, when we fixed these, we were still in a state of negative water supply - we were taking it out faster than the spring was putting it in.

Two hours of cleaning the spring and resetting the delivery hose seemed to restore the balance until Shawn got in the shower at midnight (long story) and ran out of water again. He went back to sleep, but I pulled my hair out and envisioned a dry and waterless disaster, the spring secant forever, and we, the family, turned out to wander homeless between the burned house site and the convent farm.

Morning, however, brought better council, as it so predictably does, as it turns out the loss of flow was just an airlock in the delivery pipe - when we detached the hose, equilibrium was restored and the water has been flowing ever since.

We've never been so appreciative of water before.