The Garden of Good Vegetables and Evil Serpents...

So the last several days have seen a lot of progress on the maintainance side of things. Mike Boso was here with his wife for a few days, and he is really good with electrical matters- an area where I was not. Jon was gone for a few days on other business, so things were able to progress just the same.
It started with Mike wiring up a circuit-board from scratch to control a well pump in the garden. I must say, I never dreamed that I would ever get the opportunity to learn circuitry like that, but now that Mike is gone again, I may have to wire up one or two myself, including tinting the ends of the wires (see how smart I am?) When it was done, we carried the circuit-board out to the hospital garden. The garden is about an acre and a half of vegetables- rugaro, broccoli, green peppers, maize, tomatoes, and butternut squash. In the middle of the garden is a borehole (well) where we mounted the board inside a box and ran the pump wires up to it. From under the slab of concrete slithered a baby cobra, not 16 inches from where I was standing!!! A little unsettling,but it just wanted to get away from me.
We ran into our first problems when we tried to power it up. We had added electronic circuit protection for the well pump motor. ZESA is all 220 voltage power, but it actually is a range, starting at 220, but can go much higher. The circuit protection is installed to protect the motor from voltages higher than 400 volts, and it will just kick it off. Well, needless to say, the pump kept kicking off. We discovered that the voltages from ZESA were consistantly higher than 405 volts!!! So the well still couldn't work!!! ( Did I mention that most days the hospital and everyone else run out of water at some point in the afternoon?)
On to well number two. It needs a new pump and all the three-meter lenghts of pipe lowered down the hole to a depth of 36 meters. We loaded the pump, pipe, tools, etc onto the lorry, and the driver proceeded to head through the streets of Karanda town, past the old airstrip, down some narrow backwoods path that wasn't fit for a donkey, overgrown with brambles, vines, grasses, and thorn bushes until we got to a pumphouse that was close to nowhere. We unloaded the truck, and then he drove off to do his next delivery. I had a walkie-talkie radio, but it was far too far away from Jon or Mike to work. So it was just me, some parts, and a ZESA powerline. I knew I wasn't lost, because the Zesa runs straight to the hospital. :) TIA!!
" Okay, so if I went with the lorry back, then this stuff could be stolen. So I need to be here. There's no time like the present to get started" I thought.
I grabbed the plumber's putty and set to work. Two hours later, Jon, Mike, and five other guys showed up, and boy were they happy to see that I was already well underway! Mike set to checking out the control board, complete with the same new voltage protection stuff, and soon discovered that this voltage was running a consistant 416-420 volts! So this pump wasn't going to run either! Jon sent one guy back up the narrow, backwoods path that wasn't fit for a donkey to a different borehole that WAS in the middle of nowhere, to check out the voltage there. Zero! 420 volts on the cable, but nothing in the shack. So now we're down 3 pumps. No wonder we run out of water daily!!
We got the well installed, and it ran on generator, which doesn't go over 400 volts, so the good news is it's working. The bad news is that we've now discovered a leak under someone's garden, two miles from the middle of nowhere, a ways down the narrow backroads path not fit for a donkey. So we are going to buy all his vegetables and start digging. There are a lot of people here waiting for a job, so now they have one for a while. TIA!!
Today, Jon and I left at 6:00AM to drive to Mt. Darwin to pick up Pinky, who works for ZESA. We really needed to fix the voltage problems. We were hoping to be at ZESA at 7:30, and back to Karanda by 9, but TIA. Pinky arrived late, then had a meeting for 1-1/2 hours, then had to slip out for a quick job, then could come with us. TIA! It took him less than 10 minutes to change the transformer down two pins, so then the power was a consistant 380 volts!! Yay!! We drove Pinky back down to Mt. Darwin, and then we went to the Mt. Darwin Hospital, to look at their phones. All their phones are dead, so we are the telephone repair-men! We did our inspecting and found a section of tiny conductors, capacitors, etc looked potentially fried right where the power seemed to end. I never dreamed I'd be repairing telephones! (Or at least have my face in there watching someone else repair it.) We took the back section along so Jon can work on it in his shop. He promised it would be returned within a week, working or not.... TIA