I have not flogged the techno-music group One Eyed Bastard Frog for some time. That is not for lack of belief or enthusiasm; it is merely because I thought that the message had gotten through and I did not want to bore readers. My SEO consultant tells me that I am wrong. You don’t let the truth speak for itself. You make the truth, by crafting it, massaging it, and repeating it ad vomitandum. So, here goes. One Eyed Bastard Frog is the greatest thing since the invention of ketamine. Michicko Kakutatni says, “I will, just this once, put aside my usual bitchiness. One-Eyed Bastard Frog is genius. Like Halley’s comet, you see this once in a lifetime, if that.” Rob Brown, of Autechre says, “Who is One-Eyed Bastard Frog? I want to adopt him!”. Sean Booth says, “Hands off One-Eyed Bastard Frog, you sackless workyticket! He’s mine.”
Run. Do not walk. Run to oneeyedbastardfrog.neocities.org. Tip, buy merch, download. Above all – listen.
And now – the usual crap.
These posts usually consist of one to two thousand words. I am going to engage in some logorrhea here and bust through that, but only if we agree on an exchange rate of one picture per 1,000 words. I would like to post five pictures. That makes 5,000 words. If we include the ancillary dreck, that’s 5,000 plus.
Here’s the first:
That is a screenshot of water usage in my park in northern New York from March 7, 2022 through March 14, taken from Waterscope, which is a service provided by Metron Sustainable Services. The blue area is water consumed, i.e. all water that flowed through the main intake for the park during the applicable time. The green area is water used, i.e. water that passed through individual residents’ meter during the applicable time. That park has public water, which I have to buy from the town. Since residents are not directly billed, I pass the cost of the water that they use on to them by charging them for their individual water usage. The blue area is what I pay the town for. The green area is what I charge the residents. Effectively, this means that any blue space on the graph indicates a leak. The greater the blue space, the greater the leak.
I have written about this before. Individual meters from Metron-Farnier were installed shortly after I bought that park. Those measure water consumed. A master meter, which measures water used, was installed last fall. Once the master meter was installed, I could compare water used to water consumed. That allowed me to see a picture of what was consumed, what was used, and what leaked into the ground.
The picture was not pretty.
In the time period represented by Figure 1, water used was 116.44 CCF and water consumed was 51.58 CCF (a CCF is 100 cubic feet, roughly equivalent to 748 gallons). That means that, during that week, 64.86 CCFs passed through the master meter but did not make it to individual residents. Although the meters do not pinpoint to cause of the loss, there is only one explanation; there was a hole somewhere in the mains, through which 68.58 CCFs leaked.
In percentage terms, this means that 59% of the water that I bought from the town leaked into the ground. In dollar figures, the leak cost me $324.30. The town charges me $5 per CCF used. Since I used 116.44 CCF, my bill to the town for that week was $582.20, but since only 51.58 CCFs were consumed by residents, bills to residents were $257.90. I paid the difference to feed the local aquifer. That is one week out of the year. Multiply by 52, and that’s real money.[1]
Here’s another picture, which shows when the leak first occurred:
That is a snapshot of water used and water consumed between January 16 and January 23 of this year. You can see that there was some leakage at the beginning of the week; however, the blue area expanded significantly on January 19. That is when the water main burst.
A day or so after I saw that I called Mike, the manager of that park. I said, “We have a leak”. He said, “I think I know where it is, but I can’t get at it. The ground is frozen”. I said,
-Where is it?
-It’s under Wears Tin Hat’s home. Newcomb told me he lost pressure.
Newcomb lives at the end of the run past Wears Tin Hat. We have had problems with the mains in that part of the park before. Whenever the main under Wears Tin Hat’s home springs a leak, Newcomb loses pressure. Mike continued,
-He said he can’t wash his hair now.
–What hair?
-I’ll take care of it when the ground thaws.
So, last week, the temperature warmed up and Mike fixed the leak. Here’s a picture:
That is water used and consumed between March 12 and March 19. Mike shut the water off to that part of the park so that he could work on the lines on the sixteenth. It took him three days to excavate and fix the lines. He has kept the pit open, to make sure that the leak is fixed. He tells me that the pit is dry now. You can see on the chart exactly when he shut off the water to that section of the park, because that’s where the blue area shrank.
Here is a water consumed and water used for the past week, i.e. March 16 through today, March 24:
As you can see, there was no increase in blue space when Mike turned the water back on after he repaired the lines. That means that the pipes are, at least for now, not leaking.
There is one thing that the numbers do not show. That is that that line was very difficult to fix. Mike had to excavate from one side of Wears Tin Hat’s home to the other. That meant excavating underneath and across one home, and eight feet or so in a confined space between two closely-set homes. Most of that digging had to be done by hand. The lines were five feet deep, instead of the regulation four, and the recently-melted snow made for copious ground water. Here’s a picture of Mike underneath the home:
To add to Mike’s burden, Wears Tin Hat was not cooperative. He yelled at Mike and threatened to sue, defame and attack him physically. When I stopped by, he said that he could not wait to glue me to the floor in front of a judge. He was mollified when I told him that we could comp him for part of his lot rent for this month. Water is, after all, a service that we provide. He should be made whole for temporary loss thereof.
Crazy residents aside, the story has a happy ending. Water waste was reduced. The master meter paid for itself. Metron has a good product.
I recently spoke with a park broker who asked me why I didn’t sell. “You’re miserable”, he said. “I read the blog”. “Not at all”, I answered him. “I like the business. It’s just that shitty stories make good copy.” This, at least, is a good story. The master meter worked and Mike is competent, hard-working and professional. I even understand that Wears Tin Hat might go back on the good meds, if we sweet-talk him.
[1] This picture and some of the following include isolated green spikes that look like the VIX when Russia bombs Ukraine, or Lehmann goes bankrupt. I do not know how to read them. I suspect that they are due to glitches in the transmission of individual reads. These occur occasionally, but they are corrected when the applicable individual meter transmits its read on the day subsequent to the glitch.