Our lives just took an enormous leap in comfort as we now have running water. It isn’t fully installed yet, and I’ll post more about the pump when it is.
I estimate that in the past 5 and a half years, We pumped and carried 248,930 liters (65,760 gallons) of water from the well 100ft away. I’d love to know how many joules this represents, and how much ingested Ben & Jerry’s this translates to, but I don’t need to go down this rabbit hole right now :).
It isn’t yet perfect, I’m still figuring out a few things around priming and proper plumbing. But it’s still an enormous improvement. Running water, which we took for granted most of our lives, is the culmination of not only all the projects surrounding it (well work, frost lines, piping, et cetera), but also all the projects surrounding electricity. No wonder it took 5.5 years to get here with our starting point being zero understanding of any of these things. We often run into the people we once were, who have no concept of the fact water can move outside of pipes, in buckets for example. It seems evident when you read it, but I can guarantee we were met with confused looks more than once.