Water pumps and a good jockey

Over the Memorial Day weekend we had ourselves a bit of weather that at one point over an inch of rain an hour was falling here on our river.. err I mean gate. Just as the rain was starting as a light sprinkle I was informed that we were no longer had water coming from our kitchen faucet.  I knew we were getting low on water but by my reckoning we shouldn't have been out yet. Well I went out and made a beeline for the trailer on which our generator and 550 gallon water tank reside. Upon climbing up and opening the lid I found that we were indeed low but still had enough to get us through a few more days.  I pulled the door off of the generator housing where the starting battery and water pump resides and was quick to discover that the water pump was indeed dead a no amount of fiddling with it was going to bring it back to life.  Luckily I keep an old pump as an emergency backup for just such an occasion and swapping out the inoperative one only took a few short minutes.

In the meantime, the Big Rain was gearing up good and I finished in time to avoid a good soaking. We weathered the storm pretty well, only discovering a small leak, which incidentally happened right above the computer, effectively rendering every USB port useless due to a malfunction. At the height of the storm we had roughly an inch of standing water on the road and a RIVER running behind and under the left side of the RV. There was so much water that it washed out the edge of the pad we are sitting on, along with causing the front left of the RV to sink a few inches.  The car, which was parked in front of the RV, sunk about an inch as well. I collected about 4 inches of water in a five gallon bucket in just over 7 hours that day. That doesn't include the  rain we received the night before.

Yesterday I decided that we had to reposition the RV due to the washing out of part of our pad and today we moved it. Luckily the pad was large before the rain and I was able to move the RV into a better position, roughly 10 feet closer to the lease road. The RV now sits over top of where our mat once was. Since we are sitting on a curve I also changed the angle of the RV to take better advantage of the sun's position so that we are more shaded on the curbside during the evening.

We also discovered this evening that my backup water pump had developed a significant leak. Large enough to partially fill the mat that the generator sits on.  So now its getting close to 8pm and I know getting another pump tonight is out of the question. I had set the original pump on the trailer to show to our support guy when he showed up to refuel us in hopes of getting a replacement and returning the backup to its place in storage.  So here I am with two pumps, one with a leak and another that is dead. Easy fix in my book, I took the good pump off the dead motor and used it to replace the leaky one on the working motor and Wala! I have my backup pump back. 

Its been a busy day.

Don't let your meat loaf!