…the pump ate something it really didn’t like—or the motor began to die. We don’t know. Norus Shinmaywa pumps are nearly indestructible…but it was more and more unhappy.
BUT your friendly writer-folk are not the sort to sit and wait for St. Murphy to strike. WE got a second pond pump two years ago, just because pumps have been known to croak…
There it sat in its box, waiting the call to duty—and this evening, under a light spit of rain, we pulled the ailing pump and put in the new one——-glitch—-
Seems the plumbing part that fits the Shinmaywa to American plumbing—by some micro degree only known to the metric system didn’t fit the new pump’s little adapter collar.
BUT your friendly writer-folk are not stupid, either: there is another nearly identical blue collar bolted to the old pump that DOES fit the American pipe. We get the bolts undone and, yes, the OLD Shinmaywa collar fits smoothly onto the new pump and accepts the old American plumbing-cobbled-together-adapter for the Gator Bite connector: a nifty little clip-down attachment that mates hose to pump and saves you having to draw off 2000 gallons of your pond and work upside down with a screw driver and hose clamp in an 18″ wide pit trying to attach a 3″ hose to the bottom of an 8″ wide pump body.
We plug it in. Gunk pours from the waterfall—apparently the other pump has been kind of tired. This one is not. We are now going to have to find somebody who repairs Shinmaywa pumps, or we could—a brilliant notion has just hit me—use this tired pump for the occasional job of drawing off 1000 gallons for a little water change…water changes keep minerals from building up in the pond. THis is worth some thought—the water pressure would be extreme, but we could water plants with it.
Jane, BTW, was the one having to kneel on rock and work upside down up to the elbows in cold gunky water to attach the Gator Bite by feel, being rained upon, and in twilight. But we got it done.
And thank you, Steve, for the gift of the Knipex pliers. They were all we needed, wide enough to let us handle that 3″ octagonal rim on the 2″ outflow adapter, and instantly small enough to let us gently ease the little half-inch bolts on the collar until we could hand un-screw. And the reverse, as we put everything together. We love these pliers. Adjusts with a button and moves very easily. We’re believers.
If you aren’t going to repair the replaced pump, you still will probably want to get another backup at some point. I’d also look at acquiring another one of those hard to find connectors, or having a custom one made, just to be safe. Inevitably Murphy strikes when you are feeling safe.
Absolutely. We can go on transferring the collar, no problem—unless they vary the holes for the bolts, which is why God made power drills.
But we do believe in backups, we do believe in backups, we do believe in backups….
I hate plumbing on general principals. I’d far rather muck about with mains electricity than water. At least electricity doesn’t leak out all over the floor as soon as your back’s turned.
I’ve had my own little disaster though. My Satellite TV PVR began to fail last week. I think the disk is going/gone. Luckily I won’t lose much of import but I have to survive until Thursday watching mostly live TV. I’m rediscovering how much I hate advert breaks 🙁
Technology is great..until it goes wrong :-/
Oh, dear. I know exactly what you mean: we have Tivo, and if we couldn’t time-shift, we’d run mad in the streets.
Plumbing, however, –as long as you have a cutoff valve accessible!—is not too bad. I never learned to weld, although I was approaching learning, and then the US began to shift to plastic PVC pipe, so the purple gunk (glue) solves most problems: it melts the pipe surfaces so you can’t unglue it. You just cut it and put on a new bit. Having run fish tanks myself since I was 6, doing all the air hoses, and then graduating to draining and cycling systems that require moving water through hoses—I got pretty good at it. I swallowed my share of fish tank water—before I learned to pipette in lab—and then I helped care for a room full of planaria in the RNA research. So, yep, I’ve been connecting pipes and hoses since I can remember. I learned electricity much later—and think of it exactly like handling hoses: you want it to go the right direction, it goes faster (hotter) if you don’t have a big enough hose (wire), you don’t want it to leak, and you turn the cutoff before you break into it. 🙂
Ho! Are they still publishing the “Worm Runner’s Digest”? OK, never actually saw one, but heard about it, back in the day.
“What were they thinking?” I don’t think I’ve seen a pump that didn’t have the inlet/outlet all on the same side, motor on the other side. So’s if’n I were to fix up a mounting for such a pump I’d be laying it sideways so the piping connections were on the end, not the bottom. Doesn’t it make sense? What am I missing?
Lol—I haven’t heard that term in years! 😉 For those who don’t know what we’re talking about, this is it, one of the pieces of 60’s madness at its finest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worm_Runner%27s_Digest My college roomie worked for Dr. Paul? McKendrick at one point, but I can’t remember whether that was on the stuff at Hopkins or the RNA work at OU. When I used to be active in the lab was at OU doing RNA stuff. Myself and my practical fish-keeping experience came in real handy for scientific types who weren’t perhaps as up on air-line technology as I was. We cared for a little room opposite the radioactive sign and down the hall from the anatomy lab storage in the science building basement; we had shelves and shelves of little white porcelain trays and bubblers, and we had many, many, many worms in our care (flatworms, planaria). I cleaned trays and fixed bubblers, and graduated to using gram stain and creating slides and then to recording, yes, the sacred worm-flipping. You turned the worm and then recorded which way he flipped. I was also the French translator when overseas journals came in from other people in this line of research. This was involved in RNA research—you know, the other stuff besides DNA. We’d zag over after fencing practice, do our late-night worm maintenance in the spooky basement, and do it sometimes again in the morning if we’d had an operational crisis with the bubblers.
So I can say I was at least a contributor to early genetic research.
CJ, maybe as a project, you could publish a compendium of Jane’s heroic actions in repairs, upgrades, preventative maintenance, etc. on your house. And she could do the same for you.
Make it lighthearted and fun, and of course, you can gloss over the embarrassing parts.
Lol!
She’d shoot me.
She wants the embarrassing parts left in? Okey-doke!!!!
Never a dull moment at the Fancherry Koi Resort and Eagle Take Away!