Day 8 Water & Electricity don’t mix

---

Wow we made it. A whole week has now passed, I was going to cancel today’s blog due to lack of brain function and the fact that I’d just be blabbering on about cleaning the pool, weeding, digging, watering and picking up nuts again, but as well as doing all that we also had a little drama which I thought I’d share. Like everything else here, the electricity has always been a bit dodgy and the fuses have been tripping every now and then since we got here but today they kept tripping and wouldn’t reset, so Kate set us to investigate.

After determining that the fuse box complete with circuit breakers which sits outside the front door isn’t actually a fuse box at all but apparently just switches the lights around the car park and the pool on and off, we managed to narrow down the tripping to a single circuit breaker on the inside fuse board. Unfortunately this circuit breaker it turned out controls nearly half the property including a number of the detached Casitas. Anyway off I went and unplugged anything that was running (in the process coming across a very cute little live mouse behind the fridge in the Casita nearest the car park) but the fuse still kept tripping. Finally Kate directed me towards a door in the wall next to the Casita Sierra and a scene from holiday hell (which I unfortunately forgot to capture on camera). Next to the side of the Casita is a water tank, now there are these water tanks dotted all over the property and pipes from them also snake all over the place. The tanks are fed by the mountain spring and act as reservoirs, which is fine, but as I’ve said previously the water pipes aren’t actually attached to anything just lying on the ground.

In this case the pipe that supplies the water to Casita Sierra just comes straight out of the wall and hangs down and then is attached via a T piece to the main pipe. Since there is nothing supporting this pipe all the tension is on the joint and the pipe had finally given up and fallen off. Now this wouldn’t have been so bad apart from a flood or loss of water but underneath the pipe is the electric pump which pumps the water around and this is just sitting on the ground again not attached to anything and not even raised up, its not a submersible pump and is plugged into a socket on the wall which is protected from the elements by a plastic bag.

By this time the water was about six inches deep and the pump of course was shorting out and tripping the switch. Just to add to the “oh my god” moment, next to the pump is the propane gas canister which connects to the water heater on the outside wall which also looks decidedly dodgy. Oh well, needless to say I managed cut a new piece of pipe, remake the joint so there was less tension on it, dry out the pump and reattach it all and we now have non tripping electricity, for a while anyway and why I’m telling you all this I don’t know but it was the most interesting thing that happened today.

---