She's Gonna Blow!

We have a strange little situation that happens when it rains at our house. I don't know if our brick foundation just leaks and lets rainwater in, or if we do, in fact, sit on top of some little spring that runs under our street. A couple people have said (including my dad) that they think there is a spring underneath us. Every time it rains, our (unfinished) basement floods. I mean, it's basically just a glorified crawlspace. It's tall enough for you to walk without hitting your head, and there are parts of it that have a cement floor. Anyway, it floods. My grandfather put in several sump pumps (I think there are five total) a few years back, to pump some of that water out. So every time it rains our basement floods a little, and the hose that runs out of the side of our house pours water for the next day or two. We try to capture as much as we can in five gallon buckets, but you get about 5 filled up and you're out of buckets or you don't have the time to stay out there manning the hose any longer. So, it just runs down our driveway, away from the house. We have talked about getting some kind of a tank to hold all this water, because if we could capture that water, oh my gosh. We would have the most healthy yard on the block. And with the awful drought last year? We would have been just fine.

Well, Josh finally decided to stop just talking about it and do it. He went on Craig's list and found a guy selling this 275 gallon water tank for $25. Long story short, the guy wound up giving it to us, because when he got it out of storage, it looked worse than he remembered. He had gotten it from a mulch company, and they used it to dye mulch. So, it was stained pink (which we knew going in) and had dried up dye all in it still. It took Josh a little while to clean that stuff out, but he got most of it, and we don't care about it being stained - it's just for watering our yard and garden. And we figured if it was used to dye mulch that you use in landscaping, it wouldn't hurt our, well, landscaping. We kind of figured the water might run red for a good while, but it doesn't at all. It's as clear as can be. I know that because of this next little bit here.

Josh got it all set up in the corner of our yard, with a hose running from the sump pump (only one of the sump pumps for now - we figured we'd tie in the others later, once we got our system down) to the tank. He set it up yesterday around 6:30pm. It rained last night and this morning. By 9:00 this morning, it already had 100 gallons in it. We couldn't believe it. This is from one sump pump! There are four others down there! Josh left for work, not thinking any more about the water tank. I happened to peek out there a few minutes ago and see how much it had in it. It's a good thing the tank has a metal cage around the outside of it, because it was ready to blow! That tank was bulging like you wouldn't believe, and water was leaking from the top, the bottom, the hose... Oh my gosh, I thought we were about to get the side of our house pressure washed. So I call Josh. He doesn't answer. I call my dad to see what I should do, which was stupid, I knew what I needed to do. I just panicked a little bit. To see a 275 gallon tank bulge like that was a little scary. I know that's what the metal cage is for, but still. I was nervous.

Anyway, I wound up opening the valve at the bottom to release some of the water. It was like a fire hose. That water shot out of there like crazy! Daddy told me to just leave it partially open to let some water trickle out, becuase the hose is going to continue to deposit water from the sump pump for a while. So I did. But let me tell you how much that pains me! All that perfectly good garden water, just pouring out onto the ground! I realize we've been missing out on that for a long time, but it hurts to let it go, now that we have something to keep it in. So when Josh finally called me back, I explained the situation and he said, "What do you think about getting another one?" I immediately said, "Let's do it." I just can't believe it. In about 15 hours we pumped 275 gallons of water out from under our house. Isn't that nuts? I'm excited about being able to use it to water our garden - which hopefully we'll get planted this week.