Hytta Life
Literature Review | Film Review | Training
3 February 2021
This morning began, as most mornings should but they often do not, by brushing my teeth. Oftwise this is a simple task. Toothpaste on toothbrush. Wet brush. Insert in mouth and brush vigorously. It was right around step two where I ran into trouble. There was no water and no sound from the bathroom faucet. Usually when the water freezes in a pipe it freezes between the well and the pump, and the pump strains in vain to pull water through ice when you ask for it. The complete lack of sound and water was new, so my first thought was that the pipe must have frozen in the bathroom. There's a beautiful pattern of ice glazing the inside of the windows in there, so that water had frozen in that pipe was not unreasonable. So I went to the kitchen which is somewhat warmer and tried the water there. Still no water. And no sound.
Brushing my teeth with bottled water I wonder to myself if it's possibly as fuse that's tripped. Maybe there was some issue in the night that caused the pump to run for hours while I slept. Spit. Rinse. Have a look in the fusebox. I like to think that I'm pretty good at electrical work. Electrons, unlike atoms of water, generally like to stay in their pipes and don't cause trouble as long as you give them somewhere to go. Yes, I know that it's AC current in houses, but current flows all the same. Cars are DC from the battery - 12 volts that can generate dozens of amps. Sometimes a few amps too many is all it takes to fry sometime. Hence fuses, which halt the flow if the amps get too high. Sadly no fuses were blown by the pump and I had to further investigate its silence.
The pump is located in a small room under the hytta. Not a crawl space, because you can stand up, but not exactly a basement either. There's not much room for anything other than the water pump system, that is, the pump and the filters. The water comes from a well by the hill on the far side of the hytta. It's important to know where this is because when you go outside to pee it's best not to do it there. The ground filters the rainwater coming into the well, but not that much. The first thing I checked for freezing was the water line coming out of the ground. It has a heating wire wrapped around it but the ground around it is quite frozen under the snow. This tube is flexible so you can bend it and see if there's resistance from ice inside it. The tube felt fine and the heating wire was keeping it warm to the touch. -9°C is colder than it's been so far though this winter, so still thought a frozen something might be the problem. Next in line are the filters. These are transparent and so permit visual inspection. No ice. They feel cold to the touch, but are clearly not frozen.
With everything else eliminated that left only the pump itself. The pump sat there silently reading less that zero bars of pressure. The needle was basically dead. I still thought maybt the pump was dead. I plugged a lamp into the socket the pump had been plugged into and eliminated that. Clearly the pump was getting water and electricity. So maybe it was just dead. Thoughts of replacing it swirled in my head unhappily. I unplugged it and determined to look inside it's little box of electronics. Perhaps there was a fuse inside. Fortunately, this box was not easily opened. Trying to open is I felt a metal water line between two parts of the pump and it was ice cold. Trying to move it (it was flexible pipe), it crunched like there was ice inside. Eureka? I decided to get my space heater, affectionately dubbed Melissa, and see if warming up the pump might get things going.
Melissa at work
With Melissa going full steam at the pump I stood there and watched. If the pump was just a solid block of ice this was going to take a long time. And, if so, why hadn't it burst? After a few minutes I noticed dripping from a seal on one end. Apparently this seal drips a lot, because an icicle had formed on the wall below it. A few minutes more of Melissa's warm air and the bars on the gauge on the side of the pump started to go up again. Slowly I watched the needle creep up until ... a sound! The pump had a short burst to refill the line into the house. I went inside to test leaving Melissa to run. Sure enough, water flowed from the bathroom sink on command again as it should. And all was well again in the hytta.
I gave the pump some more time with Melissa to make sure that everything kept flowing and then wrapped the pump up in fiberglass insulation. Not all problems have solutions. And eventually a problem, whether solvable like a blocked artery to the heart or bad brakes on your car, or insoluble like some cancers and execution by firing squad, will defeat each and every one of us. But not this problem. And not today.
