If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother . . .

so says Robin Williams quoting Sigmund Freud!! :-)

Late Friday afternoon, well of course, our well stopped working and we had no water to the house!!  So, on Saturday, and I mean ALL day Saturday we worked on the well!!

This is the housing to the well.  We had to break the PVC pipe away from the pump so we could open the well cover.  It had 4 very rusty and big bolts on the top.  I covered all 4 bolts in WD-40 and then proceeded to slowly remove the four bolts.

In retrospect, we should have only loosened the bolts and not removed then completely because when we wrangled the top off, half of the big metal plate that was under the top metal plates and an inch thick rubber gasket fell into the well!!  Oh, well!!

Next we pulled out the pipe that goes does to the bottom of the well to see if the foot plate was clogged with clay, causing it to not close after the pump pulls the water up from the bottom.   It seemed fine.  That pipe was about 15 feet long, so that is just a bit shorter than how deep the well is.  Here on the Oregon coast, the wells are not too deep because the water table is so high.
 

After we got the pipe back into the well and the cover on the well housing, we had to repair the PVC pipe to the pump.  We MacGyver'ed the missing well cover plate that fell into the well using bolts and washers 3 deep to hold on the top plate.

When we removed the pipe, it damaged the screw-in part (that's the official name of that white part coming out of the pump - "screw-in part")

We hoped it was not damaged enough to prevent us from putting on a new coupling.  Even though it looked bad, we were able to get the new coupling attached.
 

We had to cut this pipe and add some length in order for it to fit.

Ready for repairs!!

New coupling fits safe and sound.

And the pump was attached back to the well with the repaired pipe.

Then we wanted to prime the pump.  That funnel is where we poured water until the well pipe filled up.  That way the  pump doesn't have to work so hard when we turn the pump back on.

So, now it is all together and ready to start up again!!  NOT!!  Still doesn't work.  By this time we have been working about 6 hours and Kelly and I are both exhausted!!

So, we unhooked everything again, pulled the 15 foot pipe back out of the well and replaced the foot plate with a new one, thinking that maybe the valve in the old foot was not closing and preventing the water to fall back down the pipe into the well.
 

Then we put everything back together AGAIN and started it up!!  Nothing!!  So we called it a day and went without water all weekend.  Dejavu from when I first moved into the house in June, 2017.