In the Dungeon

Over the Holidays we overhauled our cellar cistern that is the storage for our rain water harvesting system. Zachary and I spent a few days in the dank, damp and dark cistern that we lovingly called "THE DUNGEON". To get to the dungeon you have to lower yourself through the small hatch in the laundry room floor, dangling your feet until you get your footing on the step ladder that was lowered down with a rope.

What a joy it was to pump out the cistern with a sump pump standing on a step ladder slowly lowering it into the 3 foot deep water; shoveling and bucketing out the last inch of gunk (gazillions of bacteria I imagine); patching up the leaky spots; sealing up the last foot of wall to the ceiling with rigid styrofoam; sealing and insulating the ceiling, which is the underfloor of the laundry room; fixing the supply pipe from the eaves-troughs (including hammering out part of the concrete wall to fit in the new 3" ABS pipe); installing a leaf filter (I'll talk about that in another post one of these days...) and properly piping in the sump pump drain with valves.

So now we have an air tight cistern that won't add humidity to the house. The sump pump can fill it up in the winter and spring (it is already half full now) and we can easily switch it from filling the cistern to draining outside without having to unscrew and pipe like we've been doing for the last few years.... We'll use the cleaner water for flushing the toilets as we have been for years now but now it shouldn't gunk out the toilet mechanisms as much or hopefully not at all. Some pics below.

Another job I should have done years ago taken care of! At this rate, in another decade or so, I might not have anything left to do :-)