De gritting

1978 is a long time ago, but I was there. Where? Working in Diergaard Blijdorp in Rotterdam. I was hired as an extra hand while we /they set up the World's Greatest Aquarium Exhibition. One of the consequences is that I know loadsa Dutch words related to aquariums, fish, water [dekruit, verversen, koraalduivel, schoonmaken, zeemen] for which I draw a blank entirely in English. Dekruit is the pane of glass laid on top of an aquarium to stop the fish jumping out and crap falling in. 

One of my regular tasks was water-verversen which required siphoning out a third of the water in a tank and replacing it with fresh water. At the same time I had to look to the water filters replacing the filterwatten = polyester batting at each end of the filter; and like the water, changing a portion of the activated charcoal with fresh. It would be a, possibly fatal, shock to the system to replace all the water or all the charcoal all at once. Activated charcoal is as much a rich microbial ecosystem as my sourdough starter.

The submersible pump at the bottom of our bore-hole finally died this Spring after 28 years of reliable service. We were a week using old-fashioned rain-water in buckets but then got a new pump + pressure-cylinder + pipes + cables + switches + filter. 

The [miserable, incompetent, acursed] original plumber (we are now on our fifth!) installed a grit-filter . . . on the line which went from the pressure cylinder to one of the sheds. Any sand in the system went straight into the house where it a) wore out the tap washers and b) covered the bottom of the header-tank with nearly an inch = 2½cm of fine white sand. It was plumber #3 who figured this out and moved the filter further up the system . . . so it actually worked where needed. It was Younger Bob who bent double in the attic one afternoon and siphoned the sand out of the header tank. There's some suction in a 6 m fall! Younger Bob also developed the habit of cleaning the filter but then stopped because a) there was no more grit in the bore hole (??) b) he was a-feared of ripping the whole filter away from the steadily greening copper pipe to which it was attached.

Seems that the grit-filter, in a recently disrupted bore-hole, needs to be cleaned about once a month. We know something is amiss when the kitchen faucet starts to wimp out to a dribble rather than a manly gush-forth. 1st of July, I was Home Alone, and went for the filter with a couple of buckets of clear clean water and a bottle-brush. The Before and After picture above shows what can be achieved with 10 minutes of gentle scrub-a-dub-dub. And yes we are back to full-pressure.