Wood - Water Craziness

Summer is typically not a busy project time for Wood, at least not for projects that involve wood. 

This year the husband has had to venture into the wonderful world of outdoor plumming. 

Our neighborhood recently had secondary water made available for yard use.  The city had informed us this would be available this year so the neighborhood was abuzz with talk of how amazing our lawns would look as the water would be much cheaper than the current culinary.

Two problems:

1) While our neighboorhood did have the secondary water lines running to it our individual houses did not have the water connections necessary to tie into the secondary.
2) The secondary water is about 2 cents cheaper than the culinary. Seriously!?! 

So after a couple community information meetings on how to build your hook-ups for the new water system (which really just consisted of people complaining about the cost of the water) we determined the following.

1) If we hired a landscaper to do the work it would cost about 500 dollars.
2) If we (we meaning the husband) did it himself it would cost about 200 dollars.

So why even do it to save a stupid 2 cents a gallon over our current costs....?

Here is the kicker..if we didn't go to secondary and we continued to use the culinary for our yard we were going to get charged almost double for the culinary after a threshold water usage.  Basically the city is strongly encouraging people to use the secondary as if you don't your water bill will be crazy expensive.

After the dissapointment of not saving money over our previous summer water bills we were left with the decision of landscaper or husband.

After numerous hours spent talking with other neighborhood husbands it was clear that all of the husband were going to attempt the connections on their own.  Apparently there is safety in numbers and if one can do it all of them should be able to.

That was about a month ago. 

The first step of this project was to track down all of the necessary components and apparently everyone and their donkey was installing a secondary water line so every sprinkler and plumming place around was out of stock for the big parts.  To be honest I also think the husband did a bit of procrastinating but we will blame it on on filter unavailablity.

This project was a bit more involved than just slapping some pipeing together.  It is really important to do it correctly so that your secondary (not for human consuption) water does not contaminate your culinary water.  In order to get the secondary water turned on the city must come and inspect your work to make sure you are not going to kill everyone on the block via water bourne illness.

So this past weekend the husband spent a bunch of time sitting in a hole in the front yard and making numerous trips to the House Of Hose (which when you say it sounds like a whole other kind of place of business).

I don't fully understand all of the connections that need to be make to make this happen.  All I know is that we need a swingline and that the husband needed to dig not only one but two large holes in the front yard. 

Is the project done? 

So close...all of the inspections are done and have passed!  We are just eagerly awaiting our water meter from the city. 

Then and only then will we be able to enjoy our not cheaper non-drinkable water.