Water, Water Everywhere

My apologies to those who have missed me recently but we have been helping a friend settle into her home. At times there have been eight of us over there cleaning away, so there has been plenty of water sloshing about there. The good news is that now it not only looks cleaner, but it smells cleaner too. There is much to be said for many hands making light work, and when you are helping friends out no one minds rolling up their sleeves and pitching in. So as you can imagine this has led to mopping, scrubbing and mopping again.

Our next escapade with water has involved the weather.  There have been the usual thunderstorms, they might be slightly later this year but they have arrived. Well other people have had them, we have had the banging and crashing, and lightning flashing. Power going on and off. Thinking that we were in for a downpour I held off watering the garden. Did we get any rain? Not a drop, so there I was out in the dark watering the garden while wearing a head torch. Now these head torches might be brilliant normally but they do have their down sides too. These involve kamikaze moths, fortunately the big Hawk moths aren't about at the moment. We have seen a few early fireflies though.

Cleaning Operations On The Pool

Our pool is up and full of water. Unfortunately our pump decided that it was going to pack up this year. The impellar thought that it would be a good idea if it fell to bits and jammed up against the copper windings. We were fortunate to be able to borrow a pump, but it was less than half of the size. So only the top surfface of the pool was getting circulated. Meanwhile the rest of the pool was looking as though the village has been rinsing nappies out in it, fortunately without the accompanying smell. Unable to repair our pump we had to go and get a new one, and for the sake of 10 Leva I could the one with the much higher flow rate.

Yesterday was my designated pool cleaning day, so the new pump was swapped over with the borrowed pump. The vast majority of the water had taken on the appearance of pea soup, luckily without the consistancy. Now the pumps and fillters on these above ground pools are ok for circulating the water and straining the dead bugs and stuff from the surface, but how do you deal with the middle layer, or even the base? The base I have a scrubbing brush effort onto which you attach your garden hose. This supposedly creates a venturi effect and sucks all of the rubbish from the bottom of the pool  and deposits it into a little bag. Only in our case as I was scrubbing the bottom there was a cloud streaming out from behind the bag. Either the pressure of the hose was too great or the weave of the material that the bag is made from is too loose. I suspect the bag.

Big Shorts

Now some might has decided that venturing into that water was not for them, but I have swam in worse than that. So safe in the knowledge that I was not going to trip over old shopping trolleys, pram wheels or bike frames it was time to don shorts and commense battle. That water was bloody freezing, and every step stirred up more rubbish from the bottom. I dispensed with the scrubbing brush and used spare hose connected to the outflow connection to act like a hoover tube. At different times I was being supervised by Merlin, Billy or Mini, who took it in turns to sit on the pool steps, the dogs would have had a go too if we would have let them. The tube idea was acting brilliantly, but the filter soon clogged up. So that is when I found the next snagette. The elastic seems to have given up the ghost on my shorts, which became apparent as i was climbing out of the pool. Thankfully there were no neighbours about to see a full moon rising, and my apologies if anyone is reading this while eating. Henceforward these are my pool cleaning shorts, unless we have company and then Net might just hide them. The good news is that the day spent cleaning the pool yesterday is paying dividends. No longer does it look like the village nappy wash, nor does it look like pea soup, or even the water from washing up the pea soup pot and dishes. I can see the bottom and it is blue, OK so it isn't crystal clear yet but I am getting there. Yesterday I must have done about a dozen filter changes and flushes, the pool has now had an extra dose of chlorine granules to help it along the way. I had intended to do some more today but we have had plenty of rain and storms about.

Cellar Wall Drying Out

The storm last night also caused a problem. I was sat here on the computer when I could hear a drip drip drip. Thinking maybe it was from outside I went and closed all of the windows. I could still hear it, so into the bathroom and make sure that it is nothing there, everything seemed fine. The water meter was fine so there was no burst pipe. There was nothing coming through the ceiling upstairs, and nothing through the ceiling in the cellar. Then I noticed the wall behind the couch in the cellar. It was like the boys toilets after a competition at my old infants school, you know the type of competition that I mean.

In the normal course of things I enjoy seeing a waterfall as much as the next person. However, I am not overly keen about having a working example in our cellar lounge. I removed the couch out of harms way, and made sure that there wasn't any electrical about. Donning the now famous head torch, I went round to the back of the house. The problem was that we also had a waterfall coming from the guttering that runs along the back of the house. The rain was running down the roof so fast that it was going into the guttering and straight out again. I managed to protect the back wall and divert the rain away as best that I could. Touch wood it seems to have worked, as no further water has invaded the cellar, and the wall is starting to dry out now.

Just to rub salt into the wounds, the theme for the Facebook group's photo contest this month is water :o)