A Reel Hose Job

Yesterday Caroline and I went up to Waterville to attempt to add some water to the wildlife pond. As you can see by the brown area around the pond we have been losing water. I think the major problem is evaporation with the heat we've been having. Our neighbor up there had told us there was a spring on our property which they use to use. So we went searching a couple of days ago and found some run off at the bottom of a hill about 1/2 the way to the high point of the land. Yesterday we took a shovel and hose and headed up into the woods. Caroline worked on damming the runoff and I laid some hose out. In total it took 400 feet of hose and we figure we had roughly a 80-100 foot drop over that distance. We got the water running reasonably well though Caroline had to give up a pint of blood to the local mosquitoes.

Don't know if we will actually make any difference in the level of the pond but it was an interesting experiment. The dam that Caroline constructed is not completely water tight. I would guess we could get about twice the amount of water by plugging up the dam and having a larger hose. This is also coming from one of about 1/2 dozen little springs in a row at the bottom of a hill. If we could combine them into one stream it might yield a considerable amount of water. Makes me start thinking about generating electricity from Hydro. I have visions of scooping out a little pond to catch the various areas of water output and putting a microturbine down at the pond. Don't know if it would generate enough to be worth the expense but the increased water to the pond would be a big plus.

We put a stick in the ground at the edge of the current water level. We'll see which way it goes over the next little while. I figure we are getting about 1 gallon a minute with the current setup. Doesn't sound like much but that comes to about 1500 gallons a day.