- Victoria1st

Good luck and keep warm ... we ordered more firewood this evening, the first time we have ordered a second lot in the 11 winters we have lived here.

We will be needing a fifth load before the end of February - that is a total of €1250 this winter.


Brrrrrr.


Colin  

- Useless

- Victoria1st

Good luck and keep warm ... we ordered more firewood this evening, the first time we have ordered a second lot in the 11 winters we have lived here.

We will be needing a fifth load before the end of February - that is a total of €1250 this winter.


Brrrrrr.


Colin

Eeeek! This will be 6 tonnes for us for a total for a price of €600, but we will be well set up for next winter. We still think there is some more cold to come ... and rain, therefore, dampness to keep out of an old cottage.
_________________
www.victoriart.eu

.... from the land of warmth, sunshine and oranges .... 

Just had another 1270kg delivered to top up the 4000kg delivered in August. paying 125 per 1000kg but the wood does domestic water, woodburner and 7 radiators. No other 'heating' bills  

Colin (Useless)
Can I suggest that your neighbours question whether the reason for the lack of water is simply the drought. To have no cisterna is odd and may not be the only atypical aspect of their water system but I'll draw on my knowledge of a normal borehole.
A hole is drilled through the rock until it reaches the lower limit of the substrate. If the hole is in the right place there will be a reservoir of water somewhere below the bottom of the rock. When the reservoir is full the water level may be right up to the rock but after a dry spell it may be lower. The water depth could be two metres or two hundred.
A pipe, either plastic or metal, with a pump attached to the bottom, is lowered into the hole. The further into the water that the pump goes, the less chance there is of the borehole "drying up" but it should not be sitting on the bottom or sand/sludge will be continuously drawn up. For this reason I question whether the stuff coming through is from the bottom.
If your neighbours' pipe is plastic then the most likely fault is that the pump is broken, but it could be that a minor tremor/earthquake has moved the rocks and compressed the pipe.
If the pipe is metal then it comprises a number of six metre lengths (with a male thread on one end and a female thread on the other) screwed together. They are very similar to scaffolding poles as seen in the UK (not Portuguese scaffolding!) Over time the metal corrodes from the inside and eventually holes form. As the borehole is wider than the metal pipe and the water is being driven up by the pump screwed to the bottom of the pipe, some of the water will escape through the holes and fall back down outside the pipe to the reservoir. At first this will result in a reducing amount of water coming to the surface but as the corrosion gets worse all the water will be lost. There are businesses in Portugal with rigs which will pull up the pipe. The sections are unscrewed and laid aside until the last section, with the pump, is on the surface. (My pipe is said to be 265 metres deep and I dread the day when it has to come up).


Bill  

That is what happened to ours 240 deep .
Pump packed up , when they took all the pipes out they had corroded,.
Cant afford to replace at the moment told it will be €5000.

luckely we got connected to the mains , so we just fill our cisterna up  

Thanks for your lengthy, and helpful, response Bill (and also for your PM).

I have more or less given up on this despite feeling very sorry for them. He is an elderly retired engineer who "has done everything and knows everything" and will not accept advice or help from anyone. The house is about 20 years old and was built "on the cheap" by the previous owners. There appear to be no detailed plans and everything which is "out of sight" (i.e. underground) is a total mystery. The possibility of corrosion is very real since we are only 13 metres above sea level and are on limestone so the groundwater is both saline and calcareous. I do not have a borehole for that reason - glasses washed in borehole water are covered in scale, clothes feel sticky and it rapidly corrodes or scales-up the plumbing. We are not on mains so we rely on water from the irrigation canal during the summer (I let the muck settle out in my large garden cisterna before pumping it into the underground house cisterna - cannot drink it, or even cook with it, but it is good soft water from the hills to the north of us and is excellent for showering, clothes and dish washing, loo, etc.) or rainwater during the winter (I have a gutter all around the house and any rainfall goes directly into the cisterna). The last resort would be to buy-in water from the Bombeiros, but we have never had to do that.

In our 20 years here we have developed a great respect for water, both acquiring and disposing of it - we never waste a drop.

Cheers,


Colin  

The Instituto de Meteorologia now says the drought situation is worse than at this point in 2005:

www.meteo.pt/en/media/...29fev.html