Arcady Tractor Works and Arborculture

Here is a project that I worked on in Esopus last fall. The problem was the well and the house were separated by 110' of bed rock only 18" below the surface. In our area water lines are supposed to be buried 4' to prevent winter freezing. The family I was working for had just bought the house and also just had a baby, so the thought of losing water for the winter was less than appealing to them. What to do? We talked about several different options including blasting (That won the vote for least practical, most fun), drilling a new well (the only access would have been across the leech field), and finally reconstructing the original cross over. 

In the end the solution came by as a sum of several different potential solutions. The first step was to make a cut in the rock to gain an additional depth of 6", and man was that rock hard! It took a full day of an excavator mounted hammer and diamond saw to do it. Then we made the crossover line you see pictured here. This I stole from my heatmor wood boiler installations. Air transfers heat very poorly, which makes an airspace a good insulator. So what we did was insulate the water line with foam (it is the bottom line in the picture) and than tape it to two additional lines. These lines not only create an airspace, but they were also looped together so that if this system ever did freeze, hot water could be pumped through them to thaw it back out. We then slid that whole set of pipes (and the wire) through the 4" sleeve you see. That sleeve was sealed on both ends creating yet another airspace. That line was put in the rock-cut and covered with a few inches of soil. Than we applied ridged foam insulation over the line and back filled the trench. The grade was than raised 1' to give us a total depth of 3', one less then ideal. It would have been a much easier solution to just raise the whole area up 2', but with the a near 30% grade there was going to nothing from holding that soil from running into the family room.