Topband: 160M ARRL DX CW Contest Humor at VY2ZM (long but quite a tale!)

[k1zm at aol.com]

Hi Gang


My brother Peter K3ZM this morning asked me if I had managed to survive the water flood mess which occurred in my basement here at VY2ZM last Friday morning - and after sending him my reply, I thought it might be a good read for the Topband crowd - if N7TR thinks it worthy.


Yes, I did manage to clean up the basement water flood mess but it was really an awful experience to have to deal with just before a major contest!



And it was a wierd problem too...


Background


Two oil lines come into my bsement through the EAST wall near the oil burner from the outside.  the burner setup is a modern, two line system. These are 3/8" copper lines inside 1.5 inch OD SCHEDULE 80 PVC for protection - I assume these lines are in pvc all the way from the oil tank above ground where they start and thenalso  underground as they make their way over to the house foundation - and the PVC ends are PLUGGED with GE sealant out at the tank end.  I always check this since rain water otherwise could come into the lines in a storm.


What happened was we had a thaw here before the 2 big storms that hit back to back over the contest weekend  (This thaw was on THURSDAY when it reached 40F and then heavy rain followed all day long well into Friday morning.)


Outside between my MBR and a stockade fence where the oil tank is located, there is a LOW area that all the thawing snow and rain water drained to.  To date I have never had a problem over there with this water - NONE!


I still do not know how a CONTIGUOUS pvc run (if not spliced underground) can be penetrated by water above ground seeping down into the water table below and then entering the pvc - but that is what obviously happened to one of the lines - the other pvc run did not seep ANY water into the house through the pvc into the basement.


I assume the BAD pvc was butt-spliced somwehere below grade and below the LAKE that formed above it and this line was not spliced or taped or properly sealed in some other way you or I might do it to keep water out of the pvc line.


So, I had a veritable 100' x 200' lake 3" deep sitting outside my window - with PVC these lines say 6" below grade down in the soil.


The water seeped down when it thawed - and then seeped into the R/H pvc line and was under SIGNIFICANT pressure which forced it to literally shoot into the basement out the inside the house end of the PVC - and the rate of flow was at LEAST 1 GALLON PER MINUTE.


Worse yet - it was bouncing off the copper line inside the basement and being splattered in all directions - making it nearly impossible to CATCH.  First I had to figure out how to change the direction of the incoming flow so it would not bounce off the oil line where it went down at a 90 degree angle to head toward the burner.


First I cut off a small 6" piece of  U-shaped plastic and slipped it into the pvc to force the DIRECTION of the flow to change to a straight line shot out of the pvc and not directly bouncing off the vertical oil line - so I could then place a LARGE bucket under the now diverted flow down at the floor level.  This managed to catch MOST of the flow - but a 9 liter bucket would fill every 180 seconds.  So this was not a viable long term solution!


I literally was running upstairs and swapping buckets for about 3 hours and these buckets were really heavy too - a full bucket of water is not light at all, as we all know.


Meantime I was on the phone with Tom Gill (my builder) trying to seek his counsel as to how to deal with an impossible situation.


About 100 gallons had already hit the deck before I even discovered this leakage - and I had to deal with that too.  I used every beach towel I owned and then had to squeegie them out and reuse them to soak up all the standing water that was already all over the basement floor for about 20 feet in all directions.


To make a VERY LONG story short - Tom Gill suggested I stick a rag into the pvc to stem most of the flow and I did try that initially - but a rag is porous and once wet - just seeped water out almost as fast as before.


Then I jammed two plastic shopping bags into the pvc - tryiing to seal around the copper tube within and this slowed the flow (finally) to a more manageable level.


It took awhile,  but by tweaking the plastic inserted bags with a screwdriver, I managed to cause the resulting flow to be controllable - with a straight out & uniform drainage - perhaps at only about 5% of what it had initially been when first disovered in the AM..


I then ran upstairs and got a hose - and jammed a small plastic funnel into one end of it and positioned it JUST UNDER the remaining flow.


It fell nicely into the funnel, into the hose - and I then ran it 100 feet to its end along the basement floor all the way over to the OTHER side of the house and aimed the far end of the hose into my sump pump system.


I first tried to send the water out a nearby casement window - but this was UPHILL and no good at all.  Water will not go uphill unless under pressure - but it will go **downhill** using gravity to achieve some slight flow pressure and then seek its OWN LEVEL as we all learned in high school Physics.


Luckily the funnel and inside end of the hose were at a height about 4.5 feet above the drop down to the floor - causing a gravity fed flow downwards to a lower CONSISTENT LEVEL all across the floor and even though it was a 100 ft run - the water gravity fed its way through the hose all the way to the sump pump and most of my problems were over - but this had started at 10AM and it was now 3PM and I was EXHAUSTED.


Later that night the winds were so violent that the  jones cap atop my chimney could not follow the wind shifts properly to stay in the optimum position to allow proper draughting from the oil burner and the basement was filling up with smoke and particulate (and probably some CARBON MONOXIDE to boot).


On Saturday morning the AMP on 10M started to overheat (I can see and monitor this) and I know what this means and how to cure it.


First I turned OFF the oil burner.  Then I removed the air intake filter from the rear of the AMP and took it upstairs to first wash it out with soap and water and then dry it and replace it again on the rear of the amp.


It was full of dust and soot particulate!  Not good at all for the AMP.


(This happens only in truly violent winds - which change direction suddenly.


It happened once before when Mladen (AE2W) from K1LZ was here in 2011.)


Since I have some electric heaters and now two new heat pump inverters suppling yet two more forms of heat in this house, I just closed the shack door to stay warm and finished the contest.  One 1500w heater stayed on out in the garage during the contest to protect the pipes out there until I turned the oil back on again on Monday morning.


Other troubles...


On WED - my oil burner crashed - and at 8PM I had to go out to the road to pick up the tech service guy on my skidoo - with parts - and we found my oil burner motor had seized.  The motor turns a squirrel cage blower which provides the AIR flow to an oil burner - and without it the flame goes out and the burner goes into shut off mode.  It was odd - On Wed at 10AM I had perfect heat - but by 4PM I had noticed the house had become quite cold - and sure enough the oil burner was not on - great!  Around these parts, this is a serious problem because it gets really cold here in the Maritimes - below 0F is quite common and it was like that on several days this past week....


We finished this gem around 10PM - on WED night - so this was the week and the CONTEST from hell.


You have no idea how many gallons of water I dumped out by hand ---it was easily 250 at least as viewed over the 5 hours I was fighting it.  (And I also made one really stupid "faux pas" early on Friday morning when I bounced one heavy bucket full of water off the sillcock at the base of my water heater.  I had JUST FINISHED mopping up the first mess of water - but by mistake I had kicked "on" the sillcock at the base of the hot water heater - and it turned on the drainage valve - which dumped at least 50 more gallons onto the floor before I realized what I had done as the sillcock was behind the catch BUCKET and I could not see what I had done for several minutes,  This meant that I had to mop up  the standing water all over again - and believe me,  I was THOROUGHLY PISSED about my stupidity - as you might well imagine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!




Bottom LINE: as it relates to my 160m operating in the contest....


If I had not come up with a way to deal with this water flow - there was NO way to operate the contest and I knew it.  And, a serious SOAB/SO2R 48 hour entry was obviously out of the question at that point which led to my going single band - mainly to relax and have fun after probably the worst day in recent memory here on PEI. 


73 JEFF VY2ZM