The most enjoyable thing about moving to a farm is the new skills I needed to acquire. My work background, when I stopped, was white collar IT, doing one misguided website project after another for frivolous not-for-profit purposes. All marketing, working in the motivational, intellectual space. In the end I was so tired of it all, and it was a relief to walk away.

Farming is more hands on, practical, pragmatic. A long time ago I used to be a cook, and the sense of achievement you get from that on a daily basis is similar to farming.

But there are limits. I don't touch domestic electrical systems. Inside the house I can change a washer and replace a tap or a shower head. But copper pipes are off-limits, and we get a plumber to deal with that.

But our house has an odd, dodgy set up. Yes, there is copper in the house, But outside the house, all the plumbing has been done using agricultural pipe. It sort of makes sense, the house water pressure comes from an on-demand pump that is connected to the massive water tank. From the pump to the house its poly-pipe. At each point where copper goes into the house there is a bizarre, hand-made looking poly-to-copper join.

I can fix poly pipe, so anything this side of the copper is mine.

Some months ago the house pump started firing up in regular intervals, run for 20 seconds, then stop. If we have visitors and I hear that I know to go into the guests' bathroom and look for a tap left running, or a stuck flush button on the toilet. But it wasn't that. I checked all the taps for leaks. I checked the connections to the hot water service. Its complicated, as we have a solar water heating system, so I ended up crawling along the roof checking it all for a pin-leak. I checked the washing machine and the dishwasher connections.

The sheep and the cattle have water troughs that are connected to the house water system. The logic is, if there is a problem with our water I know to check the livestock. If the livestock were on a separate system they could be without water and I wouldn't know straight away. Each trough has an isolating tap, so I can shut it off and determine if the leak in around the trough.

At the corner of the house the water splits left and right. One runs along one side of the house and waters the cattle. The other goes in a different direction and ends up at the sheep's' trough. We had that corner pipe freeze and burst a few years back. In cutting out the split I wasn't left with enough pipe, so I ended up reconfiguring it all, and I put gate valves on each stream. That means I can isolate and shut one half of the system down, which is handy when chasing a leak.

So with this new problem I could prove the leak was somewhere between the corner join, and the sheep trough. Unfortunately, a length of maybe 80 metres.

This went on for months. Over winter the water wastage is not as big a deal, in that the water tank is full and it rains every so often. The actual amount of water being leaked wasn't that much. Hard to be accurate with such a big water tank, but my estimate was less than 100 litres a day. I guesstimated that by checking the water level late at night and the next morning when no one had used water, came up with an hourly wastage, multiplied it out by 24 hours a day.

But its not good for the pump, and as we move towards summer wasting water becomes a more serious issue.

Over time it got worse. I would wake up at night and time the intervals of the pump kicking in. It had progressed to 45 second intervals. It was starting to get to me....!

I bought two pressure testing tools. One is a hand-cranked pump that you connect to your tap. The idea is you open the tap and pump air into the system. Notionally the higher pressure of the pumped air is traceable as it leaks. Nothing to complain about from my end, but it just didn't do the job. I found it impossible to get an airtight seal on the tap fitting, so as soon as I cranked air into the system it came directly out at the tap I was pumping into.

The other tool is a set of headphones connected to a geiger-counter-like device that tracks high pressure leaks. I found a possible leak on the hot water system, and a similar one on a tap. I fixed the tap. The hot water service fitting was an outrageously complicated 4-way copper fitting, no way I was touching that. But the hot water service has its own isolation tap, and I could shut it off, and the pump kept starting up. So it wasn't that.

At this point I sanity checked what I was doing with Peter, the plumber who has been to our place a few times. He's mostly retired, but he is happy enough to drop by. I went through all the tests I had done, and although he pooh-poohed the pressure testing gear he didn't fault the diagnostics I had done.

Its possible the leak was inside the house. The last time Peter had been at our place he fixed a pinleak that had developed underneath the bath. The copper pipe had corroded. He had to punch a hole through the outside brick wall to get to the leak. To my amazement he was 100% on target and only had to smash two bricks. The pipe was bypassed with new pipe, but it left a nasty feeling that if that one is old and failing, maybe there will be more. But there was no sign of that. No damp spots, hissing in the walls...nothing like that.

Peter left, happy to come back and fix the leak when it eventually showed up.

Ok, plumbing exhumation. One by one I dug out the copper to plastic joins. Two to the bathroom, one to the laundry, one to the kitchen, one to the hot water service, three to outside taps, then an extension to the sheep trough. Our house was built maybe 50 years ago, on clay. Its set like a rock, and its almost impossible to dig out the pipes without cutting a plastic pipe with a shovel. Unless....I use a garden weeding fork, and work my way into the clay. When there's enough loose clay, powder dry, I blast it with a leaf blower. The dust goes everywhere, of course, and when I have finished there is no dirt to put back in the hole...but it's easier than digging rock hard clay.

One by one they were dug out. The second last tap wasn't the culprit, but as I was digging it out I noticed damp soil a metre away. I followed that, dug my finger into the ground and a bubbler pushed a small pulse of water up. Bizarrely the tube of water twisted through the hard clay for a metre, so I kept digging, and I eventually arrived at another fractured corner join. Annoyingly, the fittings were an older, different format and I couldn't match them. I ended up cutting it all out and putting in new pieces. Maybe I was cutting corners?

So simple, once the leak was found.

So, why did it take me so long to find the leak? The main reason was the leak is close to a downpipe that is damaged. Water from the roof guttering passes through, and some of it splashes out. So the ground around that spot is wetter than anywhere else. Which means when I was looking for a damp spot that hinted at a leak I didn't even consider that spot. So me, I was the problem. As is usually the case on this place!

That night I got into bed. The pump was going as the system recalibrated after flushing the toilet and it refilled. The cistern was full, and the pump stopped. I waited, listened, counting to 45. Went to sleep.

So peaceful!