Plumbers in Spicewood, Texas

Lake water is irrigation water, and it has to stay that way

Raw lake water is untreated. It carries silt, algae, bacteria and whatever came down the creek last week, and none of that is a problem while it stays in the irrigation system.

There must be no connection between the two systems, ever. Not a shared manifold, not a valve that can be opened to top up the house line, not a hose linking one to the other while something is repaired. A single temporary connection is how raw water ends up in drinking pipes, and it does not announce itself.

Top-up arrangements need a physical air gap. If a pond, tank or cistern is fed from a potable supply as well, the potable line must discharge above the water surface with a gap, not dip below it. A submerged fill line is a siphon waiting for a pressure drop.

Label everything at the valve, not in your memory. Permanent tags on both systems, at the pump and at the house. The person who needs to know which line is which is often someone working there in five years, in a hurry.

What actually goes wrong with a lake pump

Lake intakes fail in a small number of predictable ways, and most of them are cheaper than the pump.

The screen blocks before the pump wears out. Silt, leaves and shell debris load the intake screen, the pump starves, and it sounds like a failing pump while being a cleaning job. Check the screen first, every time.

A falling lake level changes the geometry. Hill Country lake levels move a long way. An intake that sat comfortably under water in spring can be shallow, warm and full of debris by August, and a surface pump that loses its prime is often telling you the lake moved, not that the pump died.

Sun destroys exposed pipe and fittings. Long runs of unprotected PVC from a lake to a house go brittle and split at the fittings. Pipe that is meant to be outdoors either wants burying or wants shielding.

A freeze finds the pump house first. Every part of a lake system is outside, above ground and full of water. Draining down the exposed sections and isolating them is the whole of the winter task, and it takes far less time than the repairs it avoids.

How a call plays out

Someone answers at any hour. Tell us whether the problem is on the lake side or the house side, and whether the pump is running without delivering or not running at all. If you know when the intake screen was last cleaned, mention it.

Spicewood and western Travis County are on our daily route. We work on the house supply and the irrigation side both, keep them properly separated, and will say straight out when a job belongs to a pump specialist or a lake contractor rather than to us.