During the 12 weeks of their internship they ran almost 1400 feet of high tensile fence, hand dug over 50 fence posts, hung 13 fence gates, built 2 chicken coops, one duck house, and one shade shack. They also helped with herding animals, running portable electric fence, and numerous other farm chores.

As students in the school of landscape architecture, they also left us with a remarkable plan for an edible landscape around the house. Eventually all new shrubs, bushes, trees and other plants will either be edible, bear fruits, or attract pollinators in keeping with our philosophy that every plant must have a purpose and an active role on the farm.

Patrick & Andrew leave behind their personal signatures on the farm in the form of the projects they completed.

For the last two mornings on the farm I have woken to no water from our well. When I checked the pump house the electricity was on but the water pressure gauge was reading zero. This means that for some reason the pump was either broken or not getting power. There can be 4 reasons why.

1) the power is turned off or the fuse/breaker has tripped;

2) The pressure switch is bad and not sending power to the control box;

3) the control box is bad (it has a relay and a motor start capacitor); or

4) the pump is bad. In escalating order of cost we have $2 for a fuse, $25 for a pressure switch, $50 for a control box and $330 + labor for a new pump (labor because I don’t know how to replace it)

It has been some time since I had to apply my self-composed laws of trouble shooting. They were developed over a long career in the burglar alarm & electronic security industry (card access systems).

The First Law is, “The failure is always the cheapest part, but you will replace all the expensive parts first while looking for the real problem.”

The Second Law is “If it worked yesterday and doesn’t work today, what (in the building or environment) changed?”

In this case both laws came into play. What changed was ANTS – lots of them had taken up residence in the pump house. As far as the expense of parts, I did not check the most expensive part, the pump, because I have no experience in removing one. But I did check the control box. Yesterday I removed the cover of the QD control, examined it for obvious problems like loose connections and burned wires. Finding none I replaced the cover and the pump turned on. Wow! Fixed! Or was it?

When there was once again no water pressure today,  I went through the same procedure after looking up local suppliers where I could run out and get a new one. I even did some testing on it to see if the relay coils was OK, the triac off, and the capacitor was not shorted. But my ‘remove and re-install’ procedure didn’t work this time. Still no water.

The next component down the line was the pressure switch. Had I simply put a volt meter on it I would have seen that even though it was activated, there was no power being transferred to the control box and then to the pump.

I manually operated the relay points with a screwdriver (don’t do this yourself) several times and all of a sudden there was a loud pop, fizz and a puff of smoke, and everything worked. AHA, I thought. This is a simple problem of dirty contact points on the switch. I could extend the life of this relay by polishing the dirty contacts with a little sandpaper.

As I did so, the sandpaper pulled put some black ooze from the contacts. I studied it carefully and finally realized the real problem. ANTS! I had noticed when I opened the pump house door that small ants had taken up residence but not thought much about it. I had simply brushed them off all the equipment before I started trouble shooting. Well it seems that some of them entered the housing of the pressure switch and were electrocuted. Their dead little bodies built up on the relay points until they effectively insulated the electrical connection preventing the pressure switch from sending power to the control box (see photograph below). Perhaps, since ants are an orderly society, they were marching ants that had committed a capitol crime to their eventual execution in the Ant World version of the electric chair! <grin>

So now the relay points are clean of dead antibodies <grin> and my well pump works. The floor of the pump house has been liberally sprinkled with half a box of Cathy’s 20 Mule Team Borax from the laundry room. I hope she doesn’t miss it.

I’m reminded of problems we had in the burglar alarm industry 40+ years ago. Ants, spiders and even roaches would invade the control boxes of burglar alarm systems. Back then we used batteries and relays all of which have been replaced by sophisticated electronics today. Back then the bugs would camp out in the control box and occasionally wander over a relay and set off the burglar alarm. That was the beginning of my formulation of my Laws of Troubleshooting.

The arrows indicate where the ants had collected.

Our contractors finished the new outbuilding ahead of schedule.

Thanks to L&R Construction for the grading and concrete work, Turner Concrete for the expert concrete delivery, and Josh @ Better Bilt Buildings (Griffin Ga.) for the building. A special thanks to Lake Russell Building Supply who was able to give Josh a competitive price on the building materials. That allowed us to spend our money within our local community instead of it going to a “big box” home center.

I have YouTube videos of the construction  here. I set up a camera that took sequential pictures every 5 minutes and put it together for a short video each day of construction.

This is is day 2 of construction.

Day 8 of construction.

Click HERE for our Live Cam. It is not guaranteed to be available all the time, but one of my goals is to have several live cams so you can see what is going on around the farm.

//Jon