Living on an acreage is for me the real life. Something I always dreamed of. Our drive way is 500m long, slowly going up a hill and because of that we have a beautiful view over the Rocky Mountains. I would not change this till the day I die if possible. It is close to town, close to schools, stores, doctor, library etc. We have great neighbours, all with huge equipment who removes snow from the driveway when our tiny tractor can’t handle it anymore, bring up big bales of hay if necessary or just help when you ask for it. The house is small compared to the houses around us. There is a lot of work to do inside but mostly outside but I don’t care. Although it can be frustrating sometimes.
Water comes from a well and is pumped into the house and from the house to the barn. It took some years to get the supply to the barn under control during the winter. Insulation, heaters, heater tape. When do you have to turn it one? Which heaters (there are so many) do you need? When to plug-in? Keeping the water flowing is expensive during the winter. All these heaters use a lot of electricity. After a couple of weeks of minus 20C and lower it went up to 400 dollar. Not good.
Turning them on to late means frozen pipes so no water. One year I had to bring buckets of water from the house to the barn (glad I only had 2 horses then). I don’t want to repeat that. One horse drinks a looooot of water during the day.
A well means our own and good tasting water but… There is always a “but”. Last summer we noticed that there wasn’t much water left in the well and slowly it went from not much to barely anything. First we had to reduce bathing time, then shower time, flushing toilets, then laundry wasn’t possible anymore. Placing the pump lower didn’t help and replacing the pump didn’t help. We even reached a point that we had to haul water in for the horses. No fun when winter starts.
Because we had to haul the water in anyway, it was useless to keep the supply to the barn on so we closed it off. And then we noticed an increase of water again. We had enough water for showers. Always nice to know that when you use shampoo you have warm water to rinse it out again. Then we had enough water to do the laundry too. Everybody could shower without any water shortess.Maybe we had a leak somewhere between the house and the barn??
But after 2 months of winter it was so freaking cold that we decided to turn on the tap to the barn just long enough to fill up all the troughs with buckets. That worked great. We still had enough water in the house and we didn’t need to haul in anymore. So we kept on doing that.
Till we forgot to turn the tap off….
No more water. Again. A leak between the house and the barn was now confirmed. Guess what we are going to do this summer. At least we have a couple of months to safe some money because not knowing where the leak is means digging up the entire line between the house and the barn. All 100 meters. Oh, and there is no drawing where the line is too. That’s going to be fun.
Start with Baudina 