No chlorination

15 May 2008

Dawn came early as it always does and at first light, I was on top of the water tower to check on the status of the chlorination system. It was still working. I replaced the macro dip system with the micro drip system to give me a system to finer tune our dosing. Unfortunatly, the micro drip system is slightly smaller and slipped out of the tube. Our smallest hose clamp was too big, so I secured it to the hose with wire tie and readjusted the drip rate. After making certain everything was secured, I decided to drain the tank so that when the tank was refilled, it would have properly dosed chlorinated water.

Marc, Dave and Ricki then went to work to move our water tank standpipe from the center of the water tank to the leg of the tower. This will make it more secure and less likely to be damaged. Tom is working on running power from the inverter to power lights in the kitchen and the bunkhouse rooms. Jim and Paul have started working on restoring water to the West wing of the bunkhouse. We broke a pipe earlier and had to shut down all of the water supply to that wing. Jim was able to cut away some of the pipe and seal it. So we have not installed some new valves and will have water to four of the five rooms.

Near the end of the day, I came back to check on the chlorination system. The first problem I noticed was that the micro drip had fallen out of the pipe and all of the bleach solution has leaked out of the bucket. The next problem I noticed was that the valve was no longer working and was stuck in the open position. There was already some corrosion on the device, so I was uncertain if it died due to corrosion problems or the 24-volt system. I suspect the latter. Later, Dave removed the solenoid and cleaned it up and was able to get it to actuate again on the 12-volt battery. The device was also very hot so it may have overheated. Simply put, it did not work.

Regardless, we remain without a working chlorination system and I am disappointed. We have worked extremely hard to make this happen. Had we made this work, we would have created an inexpensive dosing system that could have been copied in the region. While working on the project we realized that this was not simply about our own system but about this region’s water supply. When I return home, I will immediately start working on a system I can install and then I will return to install it. We will make this happen.