Friday 5 May 2023
Water has become the new heating in that water is now the hot topic and the subject on which we are talking about above all else. It would seem that my comments yesterday about sort of missing rain were even more pertinent than I could have realised. It has been grey most days but rain has been minimal, can you believe it. In fact, it would appear that there has been so little rain that our spring may well be very low. Chris had seen on a local Facebook group that people were commenting on the rivers being low, including the Tweed, and the river at the bottom of our drive is officially low (there is a monitoring station and a website where the data is collated and reported).
I take photographs of certain areas around our house most days, with a view to doing something creative with them for showing a year of change. Very handy, as it turns out, for checking water levels. One of the areas I photograph is our little – stream? – which runs down the garden. It has been a much quieter, gentler flow, more like a tap running than the miniature waterfall it was for most of our first few months here. It is also apparent that it has been a bit puny for quite some weeks.
I opened up our water tank yesterday to check the level – it was maybe a week ago I last checked, maybe a bit less than that – and it was only just above the pipe which takes the water down into the house. As there is only a dribble going into the tank, even by being extra careful with water consumption and reusing water, it is apparent we are using significantly more than is going in and there most definitely isn’t even a day’s usual usage of water remaining before the level will start to be lower than the top of the outlet pipe.
A few hours have passed since I started this post. In that time, I have gone to check the water again (ever so slightly lower than it was fourteen hours previously), still just a trickle. However – too long and dull to explain fully, and it may not even be an accurate assumption – when one particular tap on the outdoor water tank is turned on, water flows as it should for about twenty seconds before petering out to a dribble. I then turn that tap back off, wait about thirty or more seconds, turn it on again, another twenty seconds of appropriate water flow, then it flows to nothing. If I leave that tap on, as I did for a few hours yesterday, no more water ever comes out of it, until you turn it off, wait thirty seconds, etc, etc. I have just spoken to the factor of the land in which our spring is located. It would appear that it is up to us to sort it out, but I do now feel more knowledgeable than I could ever have imagined possible about springs and springs as water sources for houses. Unfortunately, the things we appear to need to do require – well, quite frankly, Chris has a dicky knee and wouldn’t even be able to climb the steep and uneven ground to get to the area of the spring. I was given sort of instructions to check the spring. This would involve removing a manhole-type cover (apparently two screw drivers and some brute force should do the trick) and investigating the spring (er, like dropping down into a well???) and checking to see if there is a further tank, which apparently some naturally-sourced water supplies have so as to avoid air locks – which could be our problem – and to then see if there is a filter fitted and whether that needs cleaning. If there has been a lot of rain in previous months, which there has, an unusual amount, there could be more silt than usual … I did make rough notes during my phone call with the knowledgeable factor but that’s the gist of it. I can handle getting to the manhole cover, but beyond that I feel way out of my depth. This is clearly a job for Mitch. But that would mean I have to bound up the hill (a good 200m) without falling over, down or into anything while Mitch strides up there making it look like a walk in a level park. This afternoon, I shall be going up there to take photographs and find a route which I can traverse like a gazelle.
Meanwhile, Chris is on his way to Edinburgh to meet his son, Sam, and bring him back here for a weekend of, ahem, probably no water. Agh!