Knowing Where To Tap
There’s a joke about a guy whose car quits. The mechanic opens the hood and taps the engine with a ball-peen hammer. “Try it now.” The car starts right up.
“That’ll be $55, please.”
“Fifty-five bucks?”
“Yup. Five for tapping the engine with the little hammer. Fifty for knowing where to tap.”
My parents get their water from a well in the backyard. Yesterday, they had no water pressure. I went out to take a look, and tried draining the water from the pressure tank, which is the trick that worked the last time this happened. Not this time.
So this morning, they called the pump tech out.
Turns out, there’s a circuit breaker, a “reset button”, hidden on the bottom of the control box out in the garage. We had no idea it was there.
“Eighty dollars, please.”
Sigh. At least for their eighty dollars,my folks learned where to tap.
There’ve been lightning storms around here for the past week or so. Yesterday, their power was flickering on and off. That’s almost certainly what did it; the pump has a two-horsepower motor, which takes a pretty hefty starting current.
Gah. When am I going to learn? Never, ever, call the pros without checking the damn Web first.
Tags: self-repair, water pump, water well pump