Hydro Power 15

In the typical fashion of my projects, progress on the water system and penstock pipes in 2016 was exactly none for the first seven months.

One morning in the first week of August, I got up to find that there was no water at the house. This was not an unusual occurrence, the water collection system up on the hill was a slightly modified leftover from when the previous hillbilly owners lived here. It was always in need of attention, and I would have to hike up the hill every couple of weeks when it was working well to clear screens, arrange the rocks that diverted water from the stream bed into the collection basin and reset the pipe that conducted the water into a rusty 55 gallon barrel to be sent down to the house. When we had storms, or in the fall when there were leaves and the rain washed the summer's dust and soil into the stream bed, visiting the site was an every-other-day chore, usually at the the worst possible times.

As usual, I got my gear on, machete, gloves, towel (I always end up getting wet doing the spring work), a bottle of water, etc, and hiked the quarter mile up the hillside, hacking away any brush and branches from the path on the way.

At the water collection site, I walked into a confusing scene. It looked like a tree had fallen, obscuring the upper parts of the site. I fact, a large red alder tree had dislodged from the hillside above the area and the root wad had fallen directly on top of my catchment basin. A small landslide had followed, completely burying the whole area in a hundred tons of dirt, rock, and tree. This wasn't going to be a simple arrange-the-rocks repair, my water system up there was destroyed.

Digging the area out was out of the question. Even if I had wanted such a job, there is nowhere in the steep ravine to get rid of the spoils of that work. Anything that you cut, dig or dislodge tumbles to the bottom of the channel and becomes an obstacle to further work. It would be necessary to hand-carry the tree, soil and rocks away from the site. Not going to happen.

The first order of business was to get some water going back down to the house. Amazingly, the rusty barrel that served as a reservoir was intact, the tree had fallen only inches away from it, but it was still sitting on its precarious stack of stones, connected to the now dry pipe running down the hill. The usual small trickle of late-summer water was running down the rock face above the slide site, so I made a trip back down to the house and grabbed three ten-foot sections of plastic rain gutter, some 16d framing nails, a hatchet and bailing twine. With this, I was able to construct a 25 foot flume to catch some of the water and direct it into the barrel, restoring service to the house.

The yellow penstock pipes had been tied to a small tree above the catchment basin using a length of parachute cord, and left that way since the installation in 2015. There was a bit of a hollow under the tree roots, and I could tell by reading the markings on the pipe that it was only a couple of feet to the end of the pipes. Some digging, and then sawing through the dirt with the machete severed the cord, and with some effort, I was able to pull the two pipes free of the landslide. This meant that I didn't have to shorten the pipes, and that I was able to recover the two $20 brass fittings terminating the pipes.

The rain gutter delivery system wasn't going to survive even the first heavy rain storm, so something better was going to have to be constructed. Because the water system had always collected ground water coming from a spring above the site, I thought that I would just go higher on the hill and find the source of the water and tap it before it "daylights", that is, dig out the spring source and put in a subterranean collection pipe.

I had been above the property line, on National Forest property before, the steep ravine levels out just on the other side and runs back into some small valleys. I was determined to find the source of the spring, and run a pipe the additional distance to tap it properly.

Two and a half hours of stumbling back through some of the toughest brush possible got me in about 2000 feet. I was carrying my gas-powered brush cutter, but even with that, the going was slow. In some places, the stream disappeared below huge tangles of decayed trees and brush, it was impossible to even walk there. I skirted some of the worst areas, rejoining the stream on the uphill side.

What I found as I went in deeper was that the stream was steadily getting smaller and smaller and no one source of water was to be found. There would be side channels of damp, marshy ground, some with a tiny trickle of water leading away. In practical terms, it appeared that the water was a multitude of small seeps, and attempting to tap any one would be fruitless for my purposes. A new plan would have to present itself.

Because of all of the rock and dirt, any collection system I put in would have to be above the landslide site, otherwise I'd be collecting silt and dirt for years to come as rain dissolved the root wad and landslide materials and washed them into the collection intake.

When I first purchased the property, I did some checking into a product that was sometimes used to build hydro plant intake systems manufactured by Hydroscreen. This was a series of manufactured screening systems of various types that used a specialized stainless steel grating to exclude debris while allowing a full flow of water. The design made the screens self-cleaning, requiring little in the way of regular maintenance. This seemed to be the way to go forward, keep the collection site pretty much were it was, but improve the collection and flow of the water, while eliminating the regular trips up the hill to deal with the environmental variables that always caused problems. That, and get rid of the rusty barrel.

After perusing the Hydroscreen web site to get an idea about the types of products that might apply to my situation, I called them up and got Bob Weir (not that Bob Weir), the owner, on the phone. After some discussion, and a few email messages back and forth, I decided on a .5mm pitch screen and collection box with a capacity rated at 50 gallons per minute, more than I would need to feed the house and my hydro plant. Bob was very accommodating, and gladly accepted a few modifications that I proposed. These included three 2" outlet ports instead of the usual one, and stainless steel flanges welded to the bottom of the box for mounting. He said he'd have it ready to ship in a few days, but I think he went right out into the shop and went to work on it, because it appeared to go out the next morning. This was not an inexpensive purchase, but one that would be well worth the cost in the long run.

Because I knew that I'd be making numerous runs up and down the hill with tools and materials for a good, long while, I convinced my neighbor to loan me one of his 4x4 ATV's so I could get up and down more efficiently. We were under Industrial Fire Protection I rules due to the dry summer, so I outfitted the quad with a bucket of water containing a saturated burlap bag, an axe, shovel, and an ABC fire extinguisher. This is required of all vehicles operating off-road in the National Forest, and I wasn't going to be the one to burn down the neighborhood.

The first task was to clear the road again, it had begun to grow brush back after the year before's clearing, and there were the usual downed trees and limbs to deal with. Hauling the chain saw and motorized brush cutter up the hill with a quad was a whole lot easier than trudging along with it over my shoulder. It also had the bonus that I was bringing loads of firewood down off the hill in a small trailer from my clearing efforts. I'm still burning some of the wild cherry that I cut then.

The quad would get to within 300 feet or so of the work area, then it was on foot to the site. Since I'd be handling tools and materials over what was less elegant than your average goat track, I spent some tine with a shovel leveling and widening that part of the path, and cutting away additional woody debris that I'd been stepping over for years.

I knew that part of this gig was going to be dressing and securing the two penstock pipes and one domestic water pipe down the hill, so I set off with the brush cutter and saw to clear and level a foot path the entire length of the pipe run to the knoll overlooking the power house (milking shed).

It was a fair amount of physical activity, taking four or five days to get the most part accomplished. This would have been down time while waiting for the Hydroscreen to be delivered, so I felt I was making use of the days as best I could.