Posts Tagged ‘ground water’
Hydrostatic Pressure
We have a new theory about the water in our basement and I have Cyndie’s brother, Ben to thank for bringing it to my attention. Ben described a situation he experienced where a rug was acting like a sponge to pull moisture out of his basement floor. That could easily apply to the soaked rugs we encountered on our basement floor.
Coincidentally, hours before Ben called I had taken pictures of an interesting phenomenon occurring in the paddocks. Rain that we received around Christmas saturated our predominantly clay soil. I am always amazed in the winter when liquid water gets pushed up to the surface by natural hydrostatic pressure (the pressure exerted by a fluid… due to the force of gravity) and then freezes. It seems counterintuitive to me that there would be liquid water near the surface in the winter.
Well, with the uncharacteristically warm winter we have been having, there seems to be more liquid water than usual.
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The darkened areas are “rivers” of ice that are forming where hydrostatic pressure is pushing water to the surface.
It would not surprise me if the water pressure in the ground around our foundation was pushing its way through the concrete in some way. We aren’t putting any rugs back down for the foreseeable future.
We happen to have a “lift system” to push basement wastewater up to the pipe that drains to our septic tank. After talking with the plumber on the phone, I looked into information on troubleshooting whether that pump was functioning properly. I admit that in the 11 years we have lived here, I’ve barely given that system a thought.
Apparently, it is recommended that an annual inspection be done to avoid major problems. Now we are considering having it checked for its first-in-a-decade inspection… whether it needs it, or not.
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Wettest Wetness
It’s official. With the end of September earlier this week came the close of what Hydrologists consider the 12-month “water year” according to my favorite weather blog, Updraft. Beginning October 1, 2018, and running to the end of September 30, 2019, we endured the wettest water year on record.
The start of the 2019-2020 water year is not wasting any time in preparing to make a run at challenging that record. Water is actually bubbling up out of the soil in some places on our land where the pressure of groundwater uphill from us is pushing it to the surface, allowing it to then flow away down our drainage ditch to ever lower elevations.
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Tuesday night, after closing the chicken door upon returning from our class in River Falls, I stopped at one of our two rain gauges. There were 2.5 inches collected, but I wasn’t certain how many days that represented. I dumped it to start fresh but forgot to mention this to Cyndie.
Yesterday, she struggled to reconcile the low collection in the gauge by the house, wondering if it might be leaking or something.
Oops. My bad.
The gauge on a fence post down by the labyrinth made a little more sense with its 2.5-inch amount. It is common to see some disparity between the two, but both easily depict whether we are receiving small or large amounts of precipitation in random blocks of collection time.
Suffice it to say, our land is unbelievably wet right now. Soggy pretty much describes everything.
I think we are gonna need a bigger boat.
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Relative Something 