Back On Board....But Now Sick

This is an actual sign we saw while on one of our farm tours. Never thought there was a problem with people just going into these places and saying, "Well, looks good, lets bury Freddie right there."

Well we have internet now, so now we can be connected to the world. Isn't that sad. It has been forever since I have updated things but I have a lot of posts ready to go. I am going to have to ration them out though or I will feel like I am bombarding everyone. Then they don't scroll down and see all of them. However, now I have some kind of bug. I know I got it from one of my brother fire fighters, who apparently doesn't feel the need to use his sick time when he is sick. Now all of us are mad at him because several of us are not feeling good after a couple of weeks. However, you must push on.

One of the major things I finished a week or so ago was the waterlines going to the new hog pasture. So what I am going to do here in this post is show how easy it is for one man to install 1900' of water line, covered, install spigets, and be ready for operation in about 10 hrs. Thats right, one full day.

The above picture is a subsoiler. If you don't have one, its the best $400-500 dollars you will spend. This thing is made to make rips in the ground so that water will be able to go inside the hard pan that most peoples pastures have over years of compaction. However, you can hook your water line to it and pull it under ground just as well. So this is what it looks like. It is a Bison SVH-1.

Take your tractor and line it up where you want your water line to go. You need to do pre rips because it will take a lot of the weight off the subsoiler when you go to pulling the water line in. I have now done it both ways. By not pre ripping, I broke about 6 sheer bolts vs. none with pre ripping. You only have to make one pass when pre ripping so it doesn't take long at all.

This is the subsoiler actually going through the ground. As you can see, it goes pretty deep. If at the lowest setting it will put your water lines about 18" in the ground.

This is what the ground will look like after one of your pre rips. You can see that it doesn't displace the dirt the way a trencher does which makes for easy work when you go to cover your line, if you choose to.

After you have pre ripped the ground everywhere you are wanting to put your lines in, take your PVC pipe and put it in 200' sections behind the rip. I then glue them together and take 2 sections of 200' and make 400' pieces. I don't go over 400' sections though because that allows you to stop and make sure everything is going as planned without pulling apart somewhere and now you have to find where it happened 18" underground. Then you will be thinking," Why didn't I just use a trencher?"

I then glue a bushing with a threaded end on it and screw a K-Line cap on the end. This is the side that you will be pulling underground. I then connect it to a chain that is attached to the bottom of the subsoiler (they don't come with these so you will have to figure a way that works best for you) and begin to pull it in. Once you get to the end, you will cut the bushing off and apply a spiget or whatever you choose to use as your water source. This is 1" PVC. I use that all over the pasture for water lines.

This is what it looks like as the water line is being put under the ground. There is no covering that has to be done because the subsoiler doesn't remove dirt as it is ripping. I usually don't even run over the rips when I am done because you will see that the areas around the rip will be much greener and absorb much more water than other places.

***Note: I have pulled up to 1000' in a run but that was over a very flat area. If you are going in dips and going over hills, go half way one way and then pull the other half going from the opposite direction. You will have one more connection to put together where they meet in the middle, but if you don't, the weight will pull your PVC in half. Then the searching begins.

Once you have all the water lines in the ground, you will have to dig out anywhere you have to make connections. This time, I had three separate runs so I had to make 3 connections. If you know you are going to be tying into this line later for future water line installation, I suggest putting a valve at the end and putting a box over it. It is nice to be able to just walk up and open the box and tie in and get going.

After you have all the lines tied together, figure out where you want to put your water sources and reach into the rip until you find the line. Its very easy. Dig out around the line and put in a T. The best thing for this is a saddle T. They sell them at plumbing stores. All you do is drill a hole in the T, then put primer and glue on the top half of your PVC pipe and inside the T, then snap it on. Drill a hole through the water line where you already drilled out the T and there you have it. I wish I would have taken a picture of this. Then attach your water source.
***Note: Leave one end of your water line open so that you can flush out anything in your line before pressurizing it.

Then put your valve cover on. (I use Shipley Doughnut buckets because I can get them for free. I just cut the bottoms out and bury it putting the lid on for protection.)

And thats it. Hope this has been somewhat informative for those who may do this in the future and sorry if it was boring to those who it doesn't pertain to. It was showed to me by a very wise man and I feel I should keep the tradition going.