The Tucker Stories

The weather around here, that is!!

Dunno if it’s just the Limburg region of Nederlands or this part of Europe, but, this place is rife with microclimates!! For example, it could be absolutely frog-strangling raining at home but be sunny at work, only 6 miles away!!! Yesterday was, by far, the worst example of the crazy weather. It alternated between rain, hail and snow, all day long!! When Kelly and the kids started to leave for Good Friday services, it was raining in biblical proportions (pun intended!!). No problemo, we’re old-Nederlanderer-hands at this: wait five minutes. Sure enough, the rain abated enough for them to dash out to the van but it started snowing whilst they were driving to church!! And, BTW, it’s like this here today, too!! Just can’t get enough!!

So, whilst they were enjoying the Good Friday services, I was home with the landlord/plumber trying to figure out why the washroom drain was backing up. We’re fortunate that this only was this the only drain backing up. In the garage is a cistern that catches the drainage from the front of the house, from in front of the garage, the drain in the garage and the drain in the washroom. In the cistern is a submersible pump with a float switch. This pump drains the cistern into the main drain pipe out of the house. This is why we’re fortunate; there’s no sewage from the cistern. Little victories, eh? I had tested/played with that pump last fall and everything was working fine. But yesterday morning, I found that the circuit breaker had failed for the basement lights — no hot water, either. I unplugged the washer and dryer and the fuse reset. Cool, hot water for those church-types! Once the landlord/plumber got here, we were able to quickly identify that the cistern pump had failed. That resulted in the cistern being full, causing the washroom to backup, and that also shorted out the lights in the basement. As the landlord is also a plumber with Schinnen, his truck had another submersible pump in it and he used that to replace the bad one. All in all, nice job for two hours of work, methinks. Kelly’s happy that the wash can get done and I’m glad there’re no more leaks.

Cheers!!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 4:14 pm and is filed under European Life, Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.