After a couple of months working our real jobs we managed to make it back for a couple of weeks in November. Believe it or not, for a Texas Boy St Thomas can be a cold place sometimes. We were surely using blankets most nights in our comfy container. The main goal during this trip was to seal the cistern so that we could store our newly collected water. This was not a job I wanted to do, plus I didn’t have the air blower to run fresh air down into the hole. So our buddy Cliff got the job.
While it’s not obvious from these pictures, it was a zillion degrees down there even with the blower running full blast. Both of our poor heroes were soaking wet after only a few minutes working down there. They are actually standing in one of the two tanks, the window looking thing is how the two tanks are connected. So for the first 5 feet or so of storage the tanks are independent, when the water rises above the bottom of the opening then they are connected. The theory here is that if one tank develops a leak you’ll at least have half a tank of water on the other side until you fix the leak. Each tank has a one inch PVC pipe coming vertically from the ceiling, this is for the water pick up tubes. Their first task was to get all the the various debris left from the original concrete pour out of there. After that Cliff mixed up small batches of ready mix concrete and made a small fillet around the entire bottom perimeter where the walls met the floor. The reason for this is mainly to give the sealant a nice soft corner to go around and so hopefully avoid any leaks. The last thing was to apply 2 coats of the Thoroseal sealant and hook up the pick up pipes and foot valves for the water system.
As I was measuring the tanks to determine how much sealant we needed I discovered that we do not have 11,000 gallons of water storage like we thought we had. Our architect had forgot to account for the thickness of the concrete walls (8 inches thick) when he did the design, he just used the outer perimeter for the calculations. We hadn’t thought of that either. So the final tally is 7,000 gallons, more than enough for us but a little bit of a letdown.
While Cliff and Caleb were busy sweating, Princess and I were working on finishing up the Total Wall coating on the last couple of walls. The other thing we decided to do was to make a way to completely close off the basement/bunker area with another roll down hurricane door. Our cameras had caught a criminal vagrant (he was arrested after about a week in possession of another resident’s things) living in the basement for a while. He didn’t steal or break anything of ours down there but the incident made us decide to put the door on. Another thing was that we wanted a small retaining wall to keep the dirt and water out of the basement. After Cliff was done with the cistern he made the wall for us.
After the wall was built we came back and framed the opening. The hurricane doors would have to wait for the next trip since they were special order. Soon it was time to pack up and go back to work for a couple of months. But with the “dump valves” on the downspouts closed up we were now collecting water. We can never say too much how grateful we are to our neighbors who let us “borrow” water for 3 years. Thanks guys, we couldn’t have done it without your help!