we bought an old farmhouse with a gravity fed spring water system. It consists of a hose dug 4 ft under ground from about 1,000 ft above the house and comes right into the house through a valve. The water worked flowed perfectly until the valve coming into the house froze and broke (but the water was flowing into the basement until we capped the valve), so we drained the hose and capped the valve. Now that the valve is fixed, we can't get any water to come into the house now. The water fed fine into the house before the valve in the basement froze. We've tried to prime it by dumping gallons of water down the hose, but no water seems to be flowing through at all as its not even a tricle in the basement through the valve? There should not have been any water in the hose to freeze and there is a screen at the water source from preventing anything from getting into the hose. Help!
No water coming into the house from gravity fed spring
- Thread starter northroad
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killforfood
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If you are dumping in gallons of water into the pipe at the spring and none is coming out at the house; you either have a leak or a clog. If you are able to continually poor water in and it keeps taking more then you have a broken pipe somewhere down hill before it is reaching the house. If it's clogged, it will eventually overflow where you are dumping the water in. Depending on the diameter of the pipe, a thousand feet of pipe is going to take a lot of water to fill up before a clog would over flow it. The dreadful part is finding the leak or clog in 1,000ft of pipe. The old school way is to dig up the pipe 1/2 way to the house and see if you have flow there. now you know which 500ft has the problem. Now dig that section up in the middle and narrow it down to a 250' of pipe. Eventually you will isolate the bad section but trust me it's a lot of digging and pipe patching. There are folks on here way more sophisticated then myself that should have an easier solution.
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