Convenient Update

I apologize — I’ve been slow to provide this update, which I’m sure you all have been anxiously awaiting.

Every single repair person/service provider who has come to this now six-year-old house ends up saying the same thing to us: “I’ve never seen that before.”

A light popped out of our ceiling at random one day, and our contractor took it back to the lighting supply store, where they didn’t believe us and accused us of — I don’t know, dancing on the ceiling or other rowdy behavior — because such a thing never happens with those lights. (One burned out on the porch two or three years ago as well — these are supposed to last 20 years.)

A plumber working on our nearly brand-new boiler pulled off a motor and assured us he’d never seen one of those fail ever before. It turned out the impeller (whatever that might be) was on the wrong side, so it was a manufacturing defect that the manufacturer never acknowledged. Because it apparently had never happened before in the history of the company.

The depressing list goes on, although we hadn’t heard “Never seen that before” for awhile. Not until the well guys showed up Monday right when they said they would, went down in our crawlspace and confronted a frozen screen on the controller: “We’ve never seen this before. We’ve never even heard of this happening.”

What is a controller? you might ask, as so many of our friends and family have. Well, I’ll tell you: I just don’t know.

Up until Monday, I thought the part was called a PID, but it turns out that’s an acronym for a brand name. A bad brand, apparently. Since Tom, our well guy (if you don’t know him, some of you may know his mother Dottie, who graduated a year behind me from Gunnison High School), was talking about pounds of pressure, and since his father is the one who recommended this as we were installing our well six years ago, I am inferring that this machine ensures an even water pressure.

We were told, upon the recommendation six years ago, that this would allow us to do things like shower and wash clothes at the same time. And, up until August 2023, I could water the front and back yards (a very loose term around here) at the same time, but then our pressure dropped and since then we use hoses one at a time. Tom said the PID (brand, not the machine) was showing full pressure — but no water. Until he flipped the breaker.

This tidbit of information kind of flipped me out, because I did that twice. It was the very first thing I did upon learning we had no water, checked the breaker and turned it off and back on just to make sure. After my neighbor Fred asked if I’d done that, I tried again, to be perfectly thorough. Neither of those tries did a dang thing for our water, but of course it worked for the guys charging by the hour.

But still, there was the frozen screen, and a computer log in the PID-brand controller showing a series of electrical faults. Which is also on the list of things people had never seen: the early demise of a number of our electrical appliances shortly after we moved in, which continued up until our friend Dan suggested we install a whole-house surge protector. Our rural electrical association also noted at some point past the problem that they’d found some sort of trippy relay or something bringing electricity to our neighborhood.

There was also Tom, noting that their supplier had been all hot on the PID brand until it wasn’t, and Tom’s company replaced a series of PID controllers all of about the same vintage as ours. Then their supplier liked a different brand until it didn’t, and then the Williams family lost their collective patience with the supplier and now shop with another company. A company that sells Franklin brand controllers, which are not as flashy or glamorous down in the crawlspace, but also have fewer parts to fail. (Tom was also frustrated that PID won’t provide replacement parts — it’s the whole unit or nothin’.)

So — a new controller that should last many years but probably won’t, and control once again over the water coursing merrily through pipes in our house. Plus several gallons in our new water dispenser, along with several other gallons in the still-leaking camping bucket.

It is good to have our abnormal, never-seen-that-before house back to whatever counts for normal around here.

I took this picture of the more-glamorous PID (RIP) this summer when trying to figure out if it had something to do with our failing water pressure. Apparently it did.