Pipeline – mixed feelings 2011.08.26

Thursday, 26 May 2011

After the miserable, cold, rainy day yesterday it was a pleasure to be out at Van Stadens this morning. We were suitably impressed with the furrow the guys dug for us, no messing about through the fynbos by the road and all the way to the end inside the nursery by the drums.

We retrieved another coil from the office, unrolled it and joined it, unfortunately all I had left was a T-piece so I made a temporary arrangement by the rockery, probably a bit too far to be a permanent fixture and laid it along the furrow.

We were a bit worried that cars would drive over the pipe so all action Ellie decided to dig the pipe in for a bit and then we routed the pipe into the dam.

Now for the exciting bit, drove to the main valve, first inspected what, from now on, will be known as Neil’s turd (sorry Neil) where he had poured concrete and then turned the water on.

Back to the reserve, no water but we could hear it gurgling when we put our ear to the end of the pipe and luckily we just had put it down again when the water squirted out. Time to celebrate with some coffee and as we were sitting there Wesley drove past so we showed him the result of fovs efforts, very pleased with the strong flow.

After coffee I wanted to check the liters per minute but suddenly the strong flow had changed to intermittent with lots of air, we are not quite sure what caused it, perhaps we didn’t wait long enough for the air to clear along the whole length.

We were running out of time so we quickly drove to the old nursery to close the stopcock and then to the main valve again to check if the water meter was still running and unfortunately it was but ever so slowly. If this means that there is still a small leak somewhere or whether the pipe was still filling up with air escaping through the air release valve we don’t know, we will find out another day.