Whew! Bullet Dodged!

I had an awful moment today.

A few days ago I went down to M's Dome for something and found that, through a failure of a garden hose sprayer nozzle, the entire cistern had emptied itself into the wash. This was annoying, but not damaging: I turned off the hose valve and waited for the solar-powered well pump to refill the damned cistern.

This morning I went to check that the cistern had in fact filled. I saw a great deal of water pooled at its base and a lot of soaked ground. I looked more closely - water was flowing out somewhere. And it looked for all the world like it was flowing out from Under The Cistern!

There is only one way this could happen. The cistern is a single piece of molded plastic. If water is coming out from the bottom, something - please don't ask me how - has poked a very expensive hole in it.

Did I mention that water was coming from Under The Cistern? Because really, that just can't be emphasized enough.

Very, very, very close examination finally showed that water was indeed coming from Under The Cistern, but it wasn't getting there through a hole - at least not a hole in the bottom. The overflow port connects to a pipe which runs down to the ground, and since I buried the pipes the end of that pipe was actually kinda, um, underground. The cistern was overflowing, something it isn't supposed to be able to do but sometimes does anyway. The water coming out of the overflow pipe was busily undermining the ground under the cistern.

Problem fixed - again. I really don't like the design of our cistern's float switch.