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There are occasional moments in our farming world that cause your heart to sink. Top of the list is probably the phone call to report a dozen Charolais bullocks galloping along a busy road, followed by notification of an impending TB test or any sort of farm inspection.
But there are other, subtler, moments of anxiety too.
It is always with more than a little trepidation that I open the six-monthly bill from NI Water, and sometimes this fear is entirely justified.
It’s about eight years since I last had a water leak, and in that instance the worst-case scenario of having to dig up part of the yard proved the only reasonable cure. After this incident, I fitted another couple of isolation taps, then installed new pipework to several fields and inspected the water meter with obsessive regularity. But, over time, this OCD behaviour tends to fade slightly, and a degree of complacency eventually sets in. Until, that is, a hefty bill lands on your doorstep.
In the middle of January an unfeasibly large invoice arrived from NI Water. At first, I tried to dismiss it as nothing out of the ordinary; after all, a full crop of birds was using two cubic metres per day, and those dairy heifers were surely drinking like fish too.
And then I checked back over the last six years, and no matter how I tried to dress it up, there seemed to be around 200 cubic metres that I could not properly explain.
Mystery
The first step towards unlocking the mystery was to inspect the meter late at night (when stock were settled and poultry lights off), and this confirmed my worst fears, because the tiny black star-wheel was spinning at an incredible speed.
Rather than going to bed and forgetting about it until first light, I took the usual option of rumbling around the bed all night while planning some sort of repair strategy. And, as always, by the time 3am arrived, I had convinced myself that the leak would be impossible to find, and the whole yard would have to be dug up.
Solution
But just like every other nighttime problem, the solution was relatively simple.
Next morning (just before the lights came on in the poultry houses), I turned off an isolation tap that feeds one yard and several fields, and went back to the roadside meter. When I saw that wee black wheel sitting stationary, you’d have thought I’d just won the lottery.
It’s another of those strange things you can only explain to a fellow farmer. The disproportionate relief felt when a hitherto insurmountable dilemma goes away is like the world lifted off your shoulders.
Only someone who has worked and quarried and hoked in pursuit of a dripping pipe will fully grasp the flood of satisfaction that conquering such a mountain can bring.
The culprit wasn’t hard to find. Had I inspected my troughs a bit more thoroughly, I’d have noticed that one of them had been running over for a couple of months. In my defence, the jet inside the ballcock assembly had broken and the water was running quietly out the back of the drinker, where the closeness of the hedge was helping to shield all evidence. I suppose that whizzing past on the quad doesn’t really qualify as a close examination.
A complete new ballcock assembly was fitted and, while I was in the notion of working at water troughs, another couple were given a new lease of life. They had been guilty of just being overfull, and occasionally dripping, despite the fitting of a new plastic piston.
I have (after working at drinkers for about 35 years) concluded that the best way to cure a leaking trough is to remove everything that comes after the black or blue piping. This bypasses plastic pistons, cracked delivery jets, worn arms, and ancient assemblies that may even have been forged by a blacksmith.
However, as all farmers are fully aware, this seemingly simple task can be anything but straightforward.
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