Ulmer: Solving pump issues for Tschida cabin owners

Ulmer

In the wilds of Lake Tschida it's not unusual for cabin owners to have a pump in the lake that provides irrigation water to trees, lawns, plants and such. In our case the pump is a submersible one that provides water to three cabins. When it works, it works very well. The detail is that putting the pump in and taking the pump out of the water is a fairly arduous task. A good year of pumping consists of putting the pump in once and taking it out once.

This year thanks to more than 8 feet of snowmelt the lake rose 13 feet overnight which was about 3 feet over the top of the breaker box that we plug the pump into. The box was destroyed so I called Paul the electrician to replace the box.

Then we drug the pump which weighs close to 50 pounds and is attached to 50 feet of wire strung through 50 feet of collapsible plastic conduit down to the shore. We assembled the pump, set the submersible assembly on the splashboard of our pontoon and dropped into 8 feet of water. Then we hooked the wires up to the breaker box, said a short prayer, hit the breaker, and patiently waited for water to fill the system and we almost did cartwheels when it all worked.

So the next day after laying out the hoses and sprinklers I fired it up and spent the next three hours mowing the area. Around 4:45 p.m. I was invited for cocktail hour so I decided I needed to rearrange my sprinklers so I wouldn't have to worry about them for a couple hours.

I turned off the spigot and moved one hose and when I turned the spigot back on nothing happened. I then noted that my entire system had shut down so I headed to the breaker box to see what happened. The breaker was still on. Did something trip the switch, did the control box blow up, is there a lose wire, did the pump die? After a modicum of switch doodling and wire jiggling I gave up and headed over to cocktail hour to bemoan my dilemma. Of course we discussed the possibilities but rather than tackle the problem I went home and managed to worry about what to do for the rest of the night.

Day 2 around 10 a.m. I went down unplugged, re-plugged, and got nothing so I headed over to RV's cabin because if it has something to do with electricity he usually has a tool to fix it. He gave me a volt/amp meter and everything checked out exacerbating our consternation. Around 1 p.m. we gave up and I called Mike at Opp Well Drilling for advice. He told me to take the amp meter and attach it to the yellow wire to see if the problem was the control box or the pump.

TJR and I had never used an amp meter before but since we were told to attach it to the yellow wire we figured we had to expose the copper to connect to it. We got nothing and decided another break was in order. When we returned around 3 p.m. it didn't look like TJR was going to be able to fill his new hot tub with lake water.

We were seriously considering pulling the pump when BGU showed up to discover a splice in the water line, which was underwater, had let go causing the pump to pump water back into the lake. So after reattaching the line and after almost two days of fixing we discovered that the pump was working just fine all along thus the problem had more to do with the fixers than the fix. Here's hoping that your solutions don't require more solving than you can handle. Yes we got the hot tub filled too.

Dan Ulmer is a parent, grandparent, as well as a retired teacher, counselor, politician, lobbyist, public employee, nonprofit executive and opinionated citizen who believes that we need to do what we can to leave the world better off than we found it.

Get local news delivered to your inbox!

The city of Mandan is creating a new liquor license class and making changes to its current alcoholic beverages ordinance.

The North Dakota Geological Survey has drafted a report that provides a road map to explore lignite coal and organic-rich mudstone that contai…

The state-owned Bank of North Dakota reported assets of $10.2 billion at the end of 2022, a second straight year of a record.

25 Years Ago – 1998

OK the calendar has moved from May to June and summer's officially underway. The first indicator of that came last weekend when one of the gra…