4/17-19/07 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

It was a beautiful 50 degrees when I arrived. As I stopped at the gate, a grouse strutted across the driveway in front of me. I hear them all the time but I haven't seen one for quite a while. After moving in, I went to work and sanded most of the surfaces due for another coat of varnish. I misread my progress chart so I forgot to sand the part of the purlin that needed one more coat. Not a huge mistake as mistakes go; I'll get it later.

On Wednesday, I spent the day planing and scraping three more logs in the Grid A1-B1 wall. I got a fourth one planed but not scraped. That one is in the worst shape of all the logs in the building so it is going to take some special attention. Before I quit for the day, I swept up the chips and vacuumed the floor, the wall and the two columns that were ready to varnish.

On Thursday morning, I varnished the four wall logs, the PSL, and the RPSL before 9:00.

It was a perfect day for working in the woods so I decided to work on the water line. There wasn't a breath of wind so it wasn't dangerous to be in the woods. The trees and bushes were budding but the leaves still weren't out so I could easily see around in the woods. And the mosquitoes weren't out in force yet. I only saw two all day.

The plan was to solder another 60 foot coil of 1" copper pipe where the hose connected to the existing pipe. I started by closing the valve at the trailer so that when I disconnected the hose at the pipe, the hose wouldn't drain and fill with air. Then I carried my plumbing tools up to the joint and disconnected the hose from the water pipe. The water ran out full force from the pipe.

Then I continued up to the springbox and closed the valve up there. All the way, I cleared branches from the trails that had fallen during the winter. This was my first time on the trails since the snow had melted and there was a lot of debris on the trails.

I went back down to the end of the pipe to see if closing the valve up above had stopped the water. I suspected it wouldn't and sure enough, water was still trickling out of the end of the pipe. The pipe has to be absolutely dry in order to solder it so I needed to completely stop the water.

Next I went back to the cabin and got a 60 foot coil of pipe and brought it back, hoping that by that time the trickle of water would be stopped completely. It wasn't. There was still a trickle of water. I decided that the easiest thing to do would be to open the union up at the spring, take the open end of the pipe out of the water, and let all the water run out of the pipe. So, I had to hike back down to the pickup to get a Stillson wrench.

I got the wrench and hiked back up to the spring. Since the union was a thread-type rather than sweated, when I tried to open it with the one wrench, I only turned the other thread fittings in the line but couldn't break open the union. I needed another wrench.

So, I hiked back down to the pickup. I didn't have another wrench that was big enough, so I took a vise-grip that I thought would work. Then I hiked back up to the spring again.

Using the vise-grip and the Stillson wrench I was able to open the union, take the end of the pipe out of the water, and open up the valve. Then I hiked back down to the end of the pipe. Just as I got there, I saw the last of the water squirt out the end of the pipe. The end of the pipe was a coil and a half standing up straight so that the end of the pipe was at the top of the coil. That makes it convenient to sweat on the next coil. I lay the coil over flat on the ground so the water could run out, and when it had, I stood the coil back up. That way there was about two feet of pipe sticking up above ground where I needed to solder, and any water left in there would stay at the bottom of the loop of pipe. That would keep the pipe nice and dry. So far, so good.

I fired up the torch and removed the hose fitting from the end of the pipe. While the parts were still hot, I cleaned up the old solder to make sure the parts would fit back on when they were cool. I have had trouble before not doing this. Then I cleaned up all the pipe ends and fittings, applied flux to all the surfaces, put the parts together, and sweated them on. I have developed a technique for soldering pipes that works slick so it was fun to solder the coil in.

While the pipes were still hot, I hiked back up to the spring to reconnect the union and start the water flowing again. When that was done, I hiked back down to the new coil expecting to see water gushing out. To my surprise, it wasn't. I figured that I had probably hiked faster than the water did, especially since the water had to go an extra sixty feet. But no. The water simply wasn't running out.

I decided to put my mouth on the end of the pipe to see if air was coming out and I almost burned myself on the pipe. It was still hot enough to burn me, but fortunately I didn't touch it.

I cooled the pipe, sucked on it, blew into it, and tried to figure out why the water didn't flow. I thought maybe I had left the valve closed at the spring, but I knew I hadn't done that. I thought that maybe there was a siphon in the pipe after all and it needed to be established. I hiked back up to the spring to check out these possibilities and convinced myself that that couldn't be the problem. I opened the union again to see if there was some clue, but I saw no problem. There was absolutely no reason the water shouldn't be flowing. I hooked the union back up and hiked back down to the end of the pipe.

All the while I was trying to think of an explanation and a strategy. I needed to get that water running again before I left for home. Nothing made sense except that the new coil of pipe was plugged. So, in desperation, I cut the new coil off a few inches from where I had attached it. The water started gushing out of the pipe.

So that meant that the coil was plugged after all. I tried to blow into the coil but it definitely was plugged. I couldn't blow into it at all from either end. I couldn't imagine how the pipe got plugged, but it definitely was. Maybe a shrew had gotten in there and got stuck, or maybe there was a manufacturing defect, or maybe someone had sabotaged the pipe. It was a mystery to me.

I decided to figure that mystery out later, but for now the important thing was to get a new coil of pipe sweated on. To make it simpler, I cut about 8 inches off the end of the plugged coil so that I could sweat the hose fitting on to the next new coil with a coupler. I checked my toolbox and I had two couplers with me so I would just use them to connect the next new coil.

I carried the plugged coil back down to the cabin, got another new coil, blew into the new coil to make sure it wasn't plugged, and then carried the new coil back up into the woods to the end of the pipe. Those coils weigh about 50 lb. so it is a little work to carry them through the woods.

Then I hiked back up to the springbox with my Stillson wrench and vise-grip and opened the pipe back up so it would drain. Then after hiking back down and draining the end of the pipe again, I went through all the processes of preparing pipes and fittings again and I sweated the new coil in place.

While I was working on the pipes, I noticed that my phone had come off my belt and was lying on the ground. I had neglected to fasten the tether string to my belt so I was happy that I noticed the phone. I could easily have lost it if I dropped it somewhere without noticing that it was gone. I hooked it back on my belt and made sure I hooked up the tether. But then a little later, after I had been squatting right on the bank of the creek, I got up and noticed that I was dragging the phone on the ground. I felt proud that I had it tethered until I picked it up and saw water running out of it. It had fallen into the creek and evidently had been submerged for quite a while while I was working. That's the second phone I have dropped in the creek. We'll see if this one recovers.

After I had finished the plumbing, I hiked back up to the spring and reconnected the union. Thinking this was the last time, I took my wrenches back down with me, certain that I would see water gushing out of the pipe this time. No such luck. It was exactly the same as before. No water was coming out of the pipe.

It was then that it slowly began to dawn on me that I should have known what the problem was all along but I had simply forgotten. It was what I called the Larry Loop Effect. The air in the vertical coils of pipe can build up a surprising amount of back pressure, and in this case where there was only 10 or 15 feet of head, it was enough to completely stop the water flow. The pressure in each loop is additive, so each loop contributes about 2 feet (the coil diameter). Ten loops adds up to 20 feet of head which was more than enough to stop the flow.

I figured that the way to fix the problem was to lay the coil of pipe over so that the coils were all roughly level. I tried that, although I couldn't get the whole thing horizontal. I could at least blow air into the loops, but I would just hear gurgling in there and I couldn't start the water flow. But at least I understood what was happening.

Since I was running out of time, I decided to take the brute force approach and simply unroll the entire coil of pipe onto the ground. Except for one problem, that worked. When I got the pipe unrolled, the water gushed out and I hooked the hose back up. That allowed me to take out a 50 foot section of hose as a result, so I coiled the extra hose up and took it back to the cabin.

The problem I had unrolling the pipe was when I unrolled it over a fallen tree and kinked the pipe. I was just too hasty. I bent the kink back enough so that water still flowed through but not far enough to break a hole in the pipe. I'll have to repair that later by cutting the kinked section out and sweating the ends together with a coupler. That kink was just one more reason to feel stupid. If I had just remembered about the Larry Loop Effect, I could have avoided all that extra trouble.

When I got back to the trailer I tried the phone. It didn't work but it beeped and seemed to have some life in it. I put it in the charger on the off chance that after two weeks of drying out it might start working again. We'll see.

In spite of the problems, all that hiking I did in the woods was very pleasant. It was a beautiful day and I can't think of any place I would rather be. And since it is fun for me to sweat copper pipes, I really did enjoy the morning.

After lunch, I met the new PUD meter reader who drove up. I left for home at 1:40.