Somehow, you just know that having firemen at your house is not a good thing.  Especially when you have to call them in a panic.  Yeah.  Not the best way to start out a nice bright new year.

And when you don’t have any water because your well needs repair, that is a bit of a drag as well.  Especially when you need to call firemen to your house and all you have a jugs of water because your well needs repair.

But all in all, things turned out okay and you know that you are watched over when things turn out to be tolerably unfortunate instead of really unfortunate and requiring benefits and hotel stays.

Our corn stove caught on fire today.  This afternoon.  And the weird thing, the best thing is that both Maggie and Jessy have bad colds and we had to cancel their trip to Grandmas up in Michigan.  We would have been gone when it caught on fire, and instead, we were here, able to respond and save the house.

Not sure what happened.  It has been running great, a little touchy and something you have to babysit a bit, lug the big bags and keep clean and all, but we just had it cleaned and serviced a week before Christmas and all systems were A-OK and a go.

The fire died out sometime in the night, and that was weird, because it had a full tank of pellets and was doing fine.  I was going to restart it but we only had these nasty little starter squares that didn’t work very well.  I tried, but it just smoked out and died, so I waited a bit until Jessy had some packages for me to take to the post office and I went to town to get the good fire starters from the local hardware store.  (Oh yeah, and some donuts from the gas station, they have the BEST donuts in the world and we were hankering for a good donut….)

Well, I got back, settled in and tried to start the dang thing back up.  Got the fire in the box going good, sprinkled in a few pellets like you should and closed it up, turned on the stove so that it would start blowing as soon as it reached the proper temperature.  Like I always did.  Sat down to work at my office computer, which is about 10 feet or so from it and was texting Rob about some business stuff.

Well, all the sudden, I notice the thing is smoking like nuts.  I call Jessy to help me fan some of the smoke and I open the porch door that is right there and try and figure out what is going on, and then I notice it’s smoking out of the hopper in the back.  That is weird.  I open up the hatch and all the sudden, flames leap out and start this heavy brownish weird smoke that feels dreadful in your lungs and makes you want to throw up…  I had my phone in my pocket and I start yelling for the girls to get the critters and shoes on, and I got a jug of water to try and snuff out the flames.  I also yank the cord from the plug so we’re not dealing with an electrical fire as well!

Oh yeah, and I call 911.  Out here it takes them a bit to get assembled and here.  We learned that with our little false alarm back in the summer.  It’s all volunteers and even though the fire station is a half a mile down our street, you have to wait for them to come off their farms and get there to come to you!  The house was filling with smoke so fast and I could hardly stand to be there, coughing and gagging as we grabbed Edward, the guinea pig, and dashed for the door.

Thankfully the dogs were already outside and Jessy was calling kitties and shoving them out the mud room door.  Maggie had thrown a coat over the little chickens, hoping to keep the smoke out of their aquarium!  (They are ok!)

Alvordton’s finest were there pretty darn quick, within 5 minutes, and they quickly assessed the situation.  The stove was no longer flaming, just smoking, and they doused it a bit more and then the three of them hefted that bad boy up and out the front porch door to sit smoldering and dejected in the front yard.  Tipped.  On it’s side and dead.  Very sad looking.

They hooked up their big suction fans and got the house vented out really fast.  Those things are impressive.  They began to investigate the stove and could find nothing really wrong, the exhaust pipe was not clogged or anything, the stove inside was clean, it just back drafted for some weird reason and caught that hopper on fire!

The girls were safe in the car, with Ed and after a little while, it was safe to go back in.  All I could think about was that we were supposed to be gone today.  The girls were going with their Dad to visit their grandparents up in Detroit, but they are both feeling super yucky from bad colds.  I was going to take them into Toledo and spend the afternoon doing some errands and such, so I would have been gone as well. I drove home last night and there was a dreadful fire just past the next town, a farm went up and they had to call trucks and men from 4 surrounding villages/towns to deal with it.  It closed off a major part of the road and it was really bad.  Fire is nothing to shrug off as being no big deal.  I am so thankful that we were here and we weren’t sleeping or gone.  It could have been sooooo much worse.

So, now, we’re out our major heating source for the farmhouse.  Not especially a good thing, but a tolerable thing.  We have a variety of smaller room heaters and a nice Eden-pure clone that works wonderfully.  And of course, our trusty little kerosene heater.  Which we are super super careful with.  We don’t leave it running when we are sleeping, never.  Makes for chilly mornings, but after today, I’m even more convinced that I really don’t want flames in our home.

I think what bums me out the most about this, is not the loss of the stove or the experience, but that it was disappointing to go through all these motions to try and do something a little off the norm and find it was a little harder than all the people like to preach.  I found the corn stove to be a delightful warm heat, but it was touchy.  You had to devote more time to keeping it running nicely, then say, turning the dial on your gas furnace thermostat.  There was the cleaning of the klinkers and the lugging of those big bags and just an overall effort that was tolerable some times and then slightly annoying day in and day out.  It was work.  More work than I was used to.  All my life, I’ve had regular, conventional heating sources.  Easy, rarely failing, expensive at times and just there.  Ready.

But I wanted to do something different, to think differently, act differently.  Thousands of people have these stoves and they work just fine.  Just like thousands have furnaces, too.  But things fail, and you’ll probably never really know the reason.  Nothing is fool-proof.  And we gave it a try.

I’ll admit, at this point, I’m not interested in going back to one.  Just too much fussing.  And in retrospect, they still need electricity and they are expensive to service and repair.  I suppose, so are gas furnaces.  I think that eventually, I will look into a very simple cast iron stove as a backup sustainable heating source to try next year.  Simple.  Put wood in, warm up an area.  No fans, no sensors, no this or that technology to it.  Just wood, fire, ash, warmth.  I realize they come with their own fussy nature as well, but I think I can deal with that.

And in the meanwhile, I’ll be looking for one more radiant electric heater to help balance out the place from the lack of the corn stove.  Just don’t have the funds to run out and buy a furnace.  Just the way it is.  We’re pretty toasty in our various areas, zone heating is pretty efficient.  And so is layering.  And thankfully, the house was super insulated before it was foreclosed on, so it’s really not too bad, even without heat.

And we don’t have to worry about the pipes bursting, because…  we don’t have any water at the moment.

(Did I mention this was a rough start to the new year????)

Well, the night before Christmas, all through the house, the toilet stopped working,  no faucet would douse….

Haha… okay, I’m no poet.  But yes, we woke up and oddly, there was no water.  Hmmm.   We checked to see if a breaker for the pump had been thrown.  Nothing.  Checked to see if we had pipes frozen, nope.  Fiddled around and finally called our hero, Jr., to take a peak.  He found that our pressure switch on the air tank was really corroded, and suspected that was the issue.  Got a new one, just $20 and installed it.  Nothing.  Hmmm…

Wasn’t about to call a plumber on Christmas Eve… so we toughed it out a day or two, with stored water and then filling up some jugs at the neighbors.  Called the plumber first of the week and got the bad news.  Our well was shorting out.  The wiring in our deep submersible pump in our well had somehow giving out and was making a circuit connection with the steel casing of our well shaft.  Hmmm.  He said it looked like it hadn’t been touched for 20+ years, which he thought was good, since, that is a long time, but then bad, because, well, the wiring would have to be replaced and possibly the pump.  He wasn’t licensed for pump work and called the only ones in the county.  I spent some time on the phone with them and of course, they want to pull the pump and replace it, and the wiring and can’t give me an estimate because there are too many variables, but it’s at least $500 and probably more like a $1000 to start with.

Hmmm.  Santa didn’t leave us anything like that, and even though we just came off our busy season, we had used most of that windfall to pay off our bills, do a few projects on the farm, finish out living room, holiday gifts, stocked the panty, fixed the car, that kind of stuff.  I thought we were doing good with like a grand left, to get us through the next couple weeks when sales drop to ZIP for a while.

Needless to say, I didn’t call them right out.  There is a artesian spring down the road and you can fill up jugs of pure clean amazing water.  Free.  Everyone does it.  The farm it’s on, they don’t mind.  So, we have been going down there every couple days and filling up all our jugs and such.  We have gone to the neighbors a time or two, they don’t mind at all, but to be honest, the spring is on our flight plan often, and it’s kind of fun, in a weird “little house on the prairie” sort of way.  The girls don’t mind at all.

Washing is done the old fashioned way, and we are using it to flush, that kind of thing.  If we are careful, we can get by with 7 gallons a day.  Including the livestock.  If we are doing a bit more washing and such, 10 will do us.  It’s really making me understand that in a true emergency SHTF sort of scenario, water is the most important commodity.  You can have a year’s worth of food stashed but do you have 3,000 gallons of water?  Nope.  That couple gallon jugs and a 5 gallon thing or two ain’t going to last you a few days, let alone a week.  And if you don’t have a pond or lake nearby, you’re in tough straights.

A couple of nights ago, while I was thinking about the well, and before the stove fire, I was getting a little upset.  I just didn’t know much about wells, and felt a little over the barrel, so to speak.  I didn’t like being told that I only had one option and it was to pay a bunch of money.  So I started to do a little research.  I mean, what exactly is involved with a deep well pump and pulling them.  It’s just a hole in the ground, about 6 inches in diameter.  And the pump just hangs there, attached to a hose or PVC pipe down.  Okay, I get it, wet, cold, could be a lot of pulling if the well is deep.  But Mike the plumber said most wells in the area were not much more than 50 to 100 feet.  So I warmed up the laptop and went straight to You Tube.

Let me tell you, I believe that the internet is one of the very best in homesteading tools.  It gives you fast and ready information and lots of variables as well!  It educates, it tickles your noodle to other possibilities and it is an awesome tool for entertainment, education, and staying in touch.  Heck, you can even make a living off it, like we do.  Awesome thing.  Great invention.  And boy, did I get an education on wells!

This fellow is a total newbie and he videotaped the whole process. Now, yeah, it was some work, but it was his first time and he did the whole thing in four hours. Without any expensive tools or rigs or anything like that.

Now, I did enjoy watching this dude’s video and his machine he created. Pretty neat.

Now, I dig Larry’s invention. And his DIY spirit. But the curious thing about this video is the comment section. Apparently, Larry has a few viewers that are well pros and they are doing their very best to shame and ridicule Larry for attempting to do something SO DIFFICULT and challenging… something they charge so much money for because it’s so hard. And difficult. Yeah.

Okay, no, I’m not really ready to do this myself. Or ask for help, it is a little tricky looking and well, I’m game to try a lot of things, but this one is a little beyond me. But unfortunately, it’s going to be something that we’ll have to save up for and it could be a few weeks of toting water. Thats life. People have had water issues for thousands of years and let me tell you, it makes me sick to see a gallon and a half of fresh water flush with every bathroom visit. Of course, I’m not really ready for a sawdust potty, or to start visiting our outhouse in the 20 degree cold weather just yet, but I will admit… it still irks me a little bit.

But the other thing I wondered about, was why can’t you access your well without a pump and electricity? I’ve always wondered about that and so I set out to learn more about wells and sustainable living and emergency water supplies. After all, it seems silly to have a well on your property and you can not access it if the grid goes down.

Here’s the skinny on a well. They basically drill a shaft down until the reach the water table. And then they go down another 20 to 30 feet so that you will have ample space in case of a dry spell, or drought and room for the pump. The pump looks like a big medicine capsule… smooth rounded edges and all that. In some areas, it’s not uncommon to have to go down 300 to 500 feet! But around here, in Ohio, the common depth is like 50 to 100 feet. Of course, your milage may vary and there are always exceptions to the norm.

Hand pumping water from much more than 20 feet is hard. There is some natural law that works with pressure and such that affects drawing water up from below ground. I didn’t totally understand it all, but it’s there, on the net, if you want to find out more.

But it’s still possible and if you were in a true emergency state, hey, you can do what you need to do. You can even rig up some sort of Gilligan’s Isle sort of rig to help you get that water up.

Of course, the fancy pump systems like the Simple Pump and FLo-Jak are pretty pricey, but still, they work. But I like that there are all sorts of other handmade options and some are less than $50 in parts.

Once we get it fixed and I learn how deep the water actually is, I am definitely going to look into something like a hand pump for emergencies. It just makes sense. You just never know.

And the other thing we are going to look into is those nice big 55 gallon barrels for out in the barn. The hardest part has been lugging water back to the animals. Thats a long walk with buckets. I think having 4 or 6 barrels back there would have been wonderful. 200 gallons should help you through a weather emergency, or electrical outage from storms or something. And you can rotate it out to keep the water fresh. I think it would be good to rig up a 55 gallon barrel for each of the barns, at the very least. And use it regularly. To keep it fresh. Just fill it once a week, and have it ready right at the animal watering source. And it can act as a heat sink as well, if we paint them black, to absorb heat in the winter sunshine.

So, education is valuable and we’re getting a headful at the moment. We’ll get by, we’re scrappy and tolerant of many things. As I look at it, mankind has only had decent running water for a hundred years. The umpteen thousand before has been by bucket and barrel. We can make due for a while, a week or two, maybe less. And the neat thing is that already our friends are coming up with ideas and help… I just talked to my friend Jan and come to find out she has a master plumber in her family and she thinks he can help out. I don’t like to assume that some people are taking advantage of folks, but sometimes it’s as clear as a tick on a coondog’s rump. And that’s pretty clear.

And we’ll just keep trying things and see what works and what doesn’t. Makes life pretty interesting. And gives me lots to be thankful for and such. I debated if I should share this with everyone here, but then I thought, heck yeah. I hope you will see that I’m not complaining, I’m explaining. And I know that by spreading this burden a bit, you never know what wisdom and advice will come from it. Heck, even just a “hang in there girls” goes a far way to making something easier to deal with.

All around me, my friends and family have been dealing with tough things… a brother in law lost a 15 year old boy to a heart attack… our neighbors have had 4 deaths in the last month! My good friend Rob’s mother in law passed away on Christmas Day. Friends have had unexpected car issues, repairs and other financial blows. We are not alone. I figure the Devil has to work a whole lot harder to make up want to give up our little dream homestead. All he’s doing is making us tougher and more determined to make it all perfect and good. A sunny disposition and some hard work and knowledge is a whole lot better than laying there on the side of the road and whining. And it looks better to your kids, whom are watching you all the time.

I figure that I’m raising up some tough girls… not afraid of life’s little detours and curves. And smart, tough girls make strong, awesome women. We ain’t skared…

Besides… who doesn’t like firemen?

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