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16 April, 2010

And It's Quiet Too!

Why, just the past few days we were anticipating starting up with the construction again. As a matter of fact, Monday evening, Roy (of Roy and Son Shipping) called and said he would be stopping by Tuesday with some packages for us.

Woohoo! That means our pool pump motor is in. Yay! Just in the nick of time too. So, Tuesday, I just assumed Roy would be by here in the morning as we were planning to go to the Friendship Luncheon at the Purple Toucan that afternoon.

Well, morning came and went, so did the afternoon. We didn't go to the luncheon, figuring it would be easier to wait for Roy here than leave a party and beat feet back here in a timely manner. So we waited.

Roy finally showed up about at about 5:30 PM that evening. We off-loaded our goodies, paid Roy and went upstairs to relax for the evening. I was going to worry about putting the pump back together in the morning.

Here's a picture of the pump motor (the white box). The other boxes have split bamboo roll-up shades for our front and back porches and a small one with two boxes of .
Boxes Hot Off the Truck
Just when you think all's well, all might not be well. As I was opening the box containing the motor, I noticed the formed styrofoam packing for the motor was pretty well exploded into several large pieces for each end with a lot of small bits of styrofoam migrating all over the place.

Looks like somebody might have dropped the motor. Oh, no. Let's hope not.
Brand New Pump
[Oops! I did leave it as a cliff-hanger, didn't I? Here's the rest of the story. I don't know what happened to the post. I do too, now that I think about it. We lost current... ergo, lost story.  - d]

So, as I vacuumed off the little Styrofoam bits and pieces from the motor, I initially thought the exposed shaft was bent. Turned out it was simply a plastic cap protecting the threads that was bent over. Whew! I spun the shaft by hand and it turned very smoothly.

Well, nothing for it but to chance it. I went ahead and stripped the power cable off the old motor, cleaned up and soldered the leads and hooked it to the motor. Next came assembling the motor to the pump itself. This went smoothly until the very end. Of course. I had a part, a white plastic flange sort of thing that could fit frontwards or backwards on two different housings. And naturally, the instructions that I had downloaded from the Intertubes didn't even have a picture of it, much less describe the part.

I tried it on one housing. No. I couldn't even get the motor close enough to the pump body to use the six bolts to draw it together. Alright. Let's try the other housing. Same sort of result. Wait a minute. I just noticed some really tiny and really faint lettering on the flange: 'this side goes out' or something to that effect. I flipped the flange around, slipped in on the second housing and, viola! It all went together like, ummm... smoothly.

That was it. Now it was a matter of carrying it down to the pump house and hooking up the plumbing, priming the pump, plugging it in, and calling for Dianna to come witness the miracle of a once-again functioning pool pump.

I flipped the switch, and immediately - it worked! And quietly too. Much better than the screech we had as the old motor was self-destructing.

Now, several days later, the pool is almost completely clear, it's blue again, and we spent three hours in it yesterday. We've invited Doug and Twyla for pool time today, so it's pretty much good to go for the hot time of year. Hooray!

PS - We also have the bamboo shades up and in place on the front and back porches. They are definitely doing their part to keep things cool in the house. All we need now is workers on the guest house and the bulkhead and we'll be good to go.

2 comments:

Perry and Mischelle said...

Dave,
So does that mean that the pump I saw you working on Wednesday doesn't work? Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.
Perry

Dave Rider said...

Hi Perry,

No, that's the one. It's working great. The pool is almost at 100% color-wise and is probably at 75-80% clarity-wise. A few more days of vacuuming will do the trick.
I can't think of a thing right now that we need.

Cheers,
Dave