Just popping back in to say the plumber never did come back yesterday and we were so sad and disappointed thinking he just didn't want to do the job. We've had that happen before and our "back up" plumber wasn't available until at least Wed. He finally called late last night and showed up here around 11 am this morning with all the supplies-yes, Easter morning with no extra charge for the weekend/holiday. All of us dug and dug yesterday, especially the kids, and we had a great clear trench for him to lay the pipe and it's finished now. Only took him a couple of hours.
We did all the hard parts of digging ourselves, the worst was the roots and going under giant cement steps. I finally have water after almost 4 whole days-whew, it was tough. The family are still out there working putting all the dirt and plants back in to the hole and good thing because rain is predicted for Tuesday and the rest of the week so we had good timing in that at least it wasn't raining since it happened. We'll throw some seed on the trenched lawn area and hope it sprouts with the rain.
We are south of Santa Cruz, in Aptos and our water district guys (and gals) are so nice. At one point, we had 4 of them here giving advice and one even "accidently" left the key so we could turn the water on and off at the meter to flush when needed. The pipe is the white pvc stuff and because of the terrain, there were way too many joints, in my opinion but it is what it is and didn't cost us $10K. I still don't know why we couldn't have used that black hose flexible stuff but this is what we have and hope it holds for another 25 years. Our giant tree looks similar in size to the pic posted. The trunk is about the same size and the roots are enormous. We finally had to go and get an ax to chop enough root away that was in the way of the new trench.
The plumber had to rush off for his Easter celebration dinner but he said he would come back soon (with the bill) and to check the pressure valve. Hopefully he will replace it if he can't adjust it. He said this model (Watts) IS adjustable but he said once they get to 8 years, they don't usually hold the setting.
We have had the worst luck with plumbers in this area and are lucky to find this guy through one of the water dept people. Depending on how bad/good his bill turns out to be, we could have a good bit of work for him since he is basically a contractor and can do electrical work too. I have a big job to do tearing out our old hot tub heater that involves reusing the electrical for new outdoor lighting and also cutting the gas line to the heater. All in all, it could have been much worse. I know we were probably required to get permits and have inspections...the whole deal..but I am just happy to have water and over the weekend no less! The few times we did anything that required permits, it always ended up costing us a fortune because hey, it's a 30 year old house but now we need to upgrade everything and anything the inspectors can see and the cost for the permits was astronomical as well. It's almost as if we escaped the bullet since we were right out front on the street drawing a crowd. (Some guy told us to throw bleach in the hole around the tree to kill it=what?! We'd just have to deal with cutting up a deal tree then! Crazy...)
The digging was really hard but saved us a ton of money! Funny too before this happened, I had a small leak in my fairly new glass waterfall faucet to the vessel sink. I had a replacement ready to put in thinking I could do it myself and all of the sudden, the leak is gone. I bet turning the water on and off so many times disloged some debris and it works great again! If I hit the lottery, I will cut this bad tree down asap but 10K is crazy expensive for us right now.
Thanks so much for all of your help! I really enjoyed reading all of your posts and learned a lot after searching for more info especially about the PRV and the expansions tanks. Nope, as far as I can tell, we don't have one of those either and I've looked everywhere! Will ask the plumber when he returns.
