Living on a farm exposes one to opportunities for enrichment city folk just don’t get. This past Thursday I got to help my brother replace three hydrants across two different farms. These are barnyard hydrants, not those things firemen use in the city. By help I mean he stayed above ground operating the backhoe and handing things while I was mud puppy in the bottom of the pit. That pair of jeans and T-shirt are _still_ outside waiting for rain to wash the thickest of the crud off them, and we’ve been getting rain most every day since.
It used to be, once you put a hydrant in, the thing lasted the bulk of your life. Two of the three we replaced were put in with the new well, just a few years ago. If the three we put in last more than a year I will be amazed.
Besides feeling cheap they had really short valves at the bottom. I wish I had taken a picture of them. If you left the handle grip to the plunger pipe set at factory settings you only got 1/4 to 1/3 the volume you _should_ have gotten from a hydrant. Moving the grip on the plunger just a touch down to open the valve at the bottom farther resulted in good flow, however, it either wouldn’t shut off OR, in one case, directed the input water directly out the petcock which is only supposed to drain the water trapped in the hydrant.
As I said, these are abysmal. Contrast that with the following.
Prior to the time a few years ago when we put the well in, I had helped replace only 2 hydrants. One was in our barn. It was a real PITA. Had to use a tiny garden trowel because there was something like a 1 foot by 1 foot opening in the concrete floor. That was after draining the water tank sheep drank out of. Yes, even after fresh straw was put down we were still basically working in… In that hydrant’s defense though, a grandfather I never got to meet put that hydrant in the barn when my dad was about my age. It owed us nothing.
The second one really sucked. In fact it was one we replaced again during this week’s activities. Outside through packed gravel. During my childhood we didn’t have a backhoe, we had shovels, picks and two kids who got to do a lot of the grunt work. While it was a lot of work, that hydrant was also north of 30 in age. I was something like 10 or 12 when we did this, now I’m north of 50, in case you need a time frame.
Hydrants stocked at big box stores and local farm supply shops seem to last at best a decade anymore. We tore the barn down a few years ago and saved the hydrant out of it. I should have put that one in. I have a feeling it would have lasted longer than these new ones. One thing is for certain, if I outlive these new hydrants I will get the opportunity to try it.