Plumbing problems at home

Electrician.com comes to you from our home in North Pole, Alaska while the servers are in California, Washington, and Alaska. Actually, we don't live in North Pole but just outside the city limits at the end of a road. There are no other homes within sight and we have a lake and about 500 acres to look at with nothing but birds, moose, and some really big long nose sucker fish in the lake. It is nice living at the end of a road where there is so much privacy and where it is very quite. We are about 1 mile from the one shopping mall in North Pole and about 800 feet from the borough bus route, and about 14 miles from Fairbanks where there are plenty of things to do including the new megastores. Yes, we have a WalMart, Home Depot, and Lowes in Fairbanks. So you could say we have the best of both worlds, country living and a civilization close by. The down side is that we have to take care of our own needs when it comes to water, sewer, and garbage collection. As luck would have it, the temperature has dropped in the last couple of days to 20 below zero (F) and that is when the pump quit pumping water from the well that I drove last summer. Now did the line freeze? I don't think so since it is heat traced using chemelex heat trace. But being a cheap shot, I heat traced it with 3 watts per foot heat trace. Or did the well go dry? We are just several hundred feet from the lake and the water level was at 9 feet last summer. The well is 42 feet down. So I don't think the well went dry. However, when I drove the last 10 feet of pipe using a 90 pound jack hammer the pipe seemed to be too loose. It is possible that the thread broke on one of the upper lengths of well pipe and the pump has only been working while the water level was above that joint and now the water level has dropped below that joint. Tomorrow I will take out the pump and 1 1/4 inch check valve and take them to a qualified plumbing shop to see if they check out. I have a hunch that the pump has gone bad since it has been making some awful noise lately. If the pump is ok and I have to drive a new well that will be interesting to do at 10 to 20 below zero. It will require a shelter and a heater, both expensive items. But that is life in the interior of Alaska where we have six months of continuous freezing weather. At least it is not 40 or 50 below, in which case, you simply don't work outside especially on water wells. In the mean time it is living without water except that which we haul.