Greetings, friends. (LXXVII)

Greetings, friends. I returned home Friday from a ten-day roadtrip to California, to my wife - my wife! - informing me that our bathtub faucet had developed a leak in my absence.

“It’s the hot water tap, so not only are we wasting water, we’re also wasting electricity,” Besha said. “I called the plumber but they won’t be here until Thursday.”

We examined the tub together. The hot water tap was plenty tight but the faucet dribbled a pretty steady stream of water. Besha had it running into a gallon kitchen pot, which was already overflowing.

“I hate wasting water,” Besha grumbled.

Rightly so. No aspect of human life can last very long without fresh water, and we inhabit a planet that is very quickly going to have too much salt water in places where people are unprepared to have it, and not enough fresh water in places we desperately need it.

Living in Portland, Oregon, the water situation here is not as immediately dire as it is in some parts of the world. It does somehow manage to pour down rain nine months of the year, but yet somehow we also get forest fires in the Cascades, and 105ºF heat in the Willamette Valley has become an annual midsummer tradition.

My wife is also an amateur gardener and a keen permaculturist. It is no mistake that the design science of permaculture was first framed in print by an Australian, coming from a place where how to conserve water sustainably for agricultural is a perennial concern. Besha thinks about water, and the influence of water on soil and soil fertility, a lot.

I went out to the shop and brought in the first of three empty seven-gallon water containers that we use for camping, and ought to, but quite evidently do not, keep full in case of emergency. It took astonishingly little time for that steady stream of water to amount to 21 gallons (~80L).

“Do we have an empty IBC tote?” I asked.

We did. An IBC is, of course, an Intermediate Bulk Container, which is one of those internationally standardized form factors for making things like food and liquids palletizable and stackable. An average IBC tank holds around 300 US gallons or 1,200 liters. Besha has several on the property from long before I moved in, in various configurations to collect and store rainwater from the building gutters for later use in watering garden and chickens.

“How do we get the water into the tote?” Besha wondered aloud.

“Siphon. A bit of irrigation tubing.” I said. “But how do we get the water into the siphon?”

“That’s easy,” she said. “We’ll just plug the tub.”

Brilliant.

Besha wanted the tote up off the ground on blocks, so as to provide some gravity pressure when we decided to use the water later. So I went and got some cinder blocks from the local big box hardware store, since I was already going there for building materials for a different project.

We measured the steel IBC frame, and then stacked and spaced 8 cinder blocks under the bathroom window, in such a way as to support the corners of the frame. Then I muscled the tote up on to the blocks. It was more unwieldy than heavy, but we got it up there without knocking the blocks over.

Then we took careful measurements from the ground outside to the IBC inlet, and then from the floor inside. We quickly concluded that there wasn’t enough height difference for a siphon to work well.

“I have an extra pond pump in the shop,” Besha said, “But it moves a lot more water than the faucet is putting out, something like 300 gallons an hour.”

We definitely didn’t want the pump running dry and burning out, but we tried it anyway, running a bit of irrigation line from the pump in the tub through the open window and into the IBC outside. She plugged it in and soon we heard the sweet sound of precious fresh water pouring into the totes, saved from going straight down the drain. We watched carefully until the pump inlet was exposed, and shut it off.

I estimated that the tub would fill to the overflow drain overnight, but I’m a middle aged man and I wake up in the middle of the night anyway. I ran the pump when I went to bed, and then again at like 3 a.m. The tub was almost full again when I got up in the morning.

“Do we have any more of those smart power plugs?” I asked Besha later that day. “Like the one we used to power the radio for scaring the raccoon away from the pond?”

“You mean the radio that the raccoon completely ignored?” Besha shot back.

But she went and found it, and very shortly had it programmed to run the pump for a few minutes every few hours through the night. We didn’t even have to get out of bed to run it.

Yesterday Besha re-routed the hose that feeds the garden drip irrigation over to the IBC under the bathroom window. As she predicted, the added 16” of height afforded by the cinder blocks provided plenty enough pressure to irrigate the garden.

Honestly, the retail price of the water we have saved is not all that much. Maybe not even commensurate with the time we spent engineering a way to prevent the waste of that water. But it was immensely satisfying to be able to save that water and put it to good use, and even more satisfying to accomplish the task almost entirely with items we had lying around the yard and the workshop.

Also it is satisfying to be married to someone as resourceful as Besha can be.

If you’re still reading this, I send you my love. I have so many more important things than a leaky faucet to write about — personal things, the state of the world, my stupid job, the wedding — the wedding! — but I have been craving too much the distraction of video games from the frankly anxiety-provoking state of things, and also roadtripping around the West Coast and enjoying what feels like the calm before the storm.

Also I have to move this journal off of Substack because Nazis, which I was using as an excuse not to write. Ceterum censeo imperdiet vigilum cessandam.

More tomorrow, insh’allah and the creek don’t rise.