I know there haven’t been a lot of updates recently, I kind of lost momentum on the writeups. However, it’s not that things haven’t been happening. The work on the house continues.

It seems that most of the things we’ve done so far has to do with water. Maybe that’s just how it is living in a place like Hilo. (The weather station says we’ve had a total of 1300mm of rain (yes, that’s 1.3 meters) since it started operating in July.) Or maybe it’s just that whoever built the place didn’t think things through quite all the way…

One thing that has been puzzling me since we moved in is where the downspout on the back side of the house goes. The PVC downspout disappears into an old cast iron pipe with no obvious exit. At some point, I even put the garden hose in it and walked around trying to hear where the water came out, with no luck. Oh well.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was out back and realized that this sound I heard that sounded like our gas grill was on wasn’t that at all, but a leak in a cast iron water pipe going into the ground next to the previously mentioned mysterious downspout. Where did this water pipe go?

While we have several taps out in the “orchard”, I know where they are fed from and this wasn’t it. There was no way to turn the water to this pipe off, so I turned off the water to the house, twisted the pipe off with my big-ass pipe wrench (yeah, it was that rusted through) and plugged it. Then I started tracking where it went.

After going out under a concrete step and passing under one of the concrete blocks supporting the lanai (awesome routing…) it made a 90-degree turn down and disappeared into something that looked like a concrete-lined hole. After some amount of digging and lifting out huge chunks of lava (the other constant in yard work here…) I got to a concrete lined bottom where the pipe disappeared down. With standing water in it.

This is the mysterious waterpipe descending into the concrete-lined pit.

Now, while it rains a lot here, you don’t usually find standing water except when it’s raining heavily, because the lava rock is very porous. But this was a concrete lined surface, clearly made to not let water through. And at this point, it hadn’t really rained for a month (we’ve had a very dry “winter”) so that water must really have been sitting there. What in the world…

Kathy pointed out that maybe this was connected to the mysterious sprinkler-looking thing coming up in the middle of our gravel-covered backyard. I’d never really thought about it, but this thing looked really out of place given that a) we don’t have sprinklers anywhere else (and this is Hilo, why would you?) and b) if you were going to put in a sprinkler, why put it in the middle of a large gravel-covered surface?

This is the mysterious sprinkler, ascending from the concrete-lined pit. At this point the water level was already rising from the rain.

I started digging down around it, and after a little more rock-lifting, that pipe disappeared under the same concrete-covered surface. Circumstantial evidence, but they sure appeared to be the same pipe. The only problem with this theory is that there was no water coming out of the “sprinkler” and I saw no obvious shutoff between it and where the pipe attached to the house water supply. I guess it’s possible the pipe was completely plugged with gunk somewhere, but that can’t always have been the case, can it? Mysterious.

I proceeded to follow the edge of the concrete-lined surface, tracing out a large, irregular hemisphere centered on the “sprinkler”. It almost looked like there once upon a time had been a pool in the backyard, that then had been filled in with rocks.

At this point of the exploration it had serendipitously started raining… It now became clear where the mysterious downspout ended up. The cast iron pipe ended at the edge of the “pool” (it’s kind of visible to the right of where the water pipe comes out in the first picture) and was dumping a steady stream of rainwater into it. Over the next day we got about 130mm (5 inches) of rain, after which the “pool” looked like this:

After 5″ of water in 24 hours, the concrete-lined pit was filled to the rim with water.

Yep, that’s right. The entire, 15-foot diameter “pool” is now filled to the rim with water. Right next to the house… What an awesome idea. Luckily it looks like the pool actually is sealed enough that it does not leak out water towards the house. I dug an “exploratory well” on the house side of it and it remained dry down below the surface. But still.

At this point our theory is that the house originally had a Koi Pond. They are quite popular here with Japanese owners. The lanai is a later addition, so when they added that, I guess they just filled the pond with rocks and covered the area with gravel.

Now, I’m not psyched about having all this water near the house, so my plan is to crack a hole in the pond at the bottom away from the house and then run a pipe down to the lava wall in that direction and dump the water out there. That way there should be no chance of having this water end up anywhere near the foundation of the house. It’ll take quite a lot of digging to get a pipe down to that level, though.