In short, the final straw was my wife’s hands. They got to the point where she could not raise and lower the handle of the old pump-handle style hydrant because of pain and weakness when she tried. But let’s back up a bit.

It’s exciting to move onto a bare piece of land with just a dream in hand. Then it turns into work. Once you have animals, there’s feeding and watering, and everything else that goes into taking good care of them. There’s the big garden. There’s also a small orchard, if forty-eight fruit trees is all that small for a “small” place.

Everything human, animal, and plant needs water. Water for the house is one thing, and it has it’s own set of challenges. Water for the animals and plants is something else entirely.

To get water where we need it we use frost proof yard hydrants. Like everyone else in our shoes, we purchased and installed the old fashioned ones with the pump-handle style handles, the ones that raise up to open and push down to shut off.

It wasn’t long before the hydrants started to leak around the compression gasket at the top, around the valve control rod. There’s no problem getting water. It’s just a nuisance. For a few times you can tighten down the nut on the compression gasket to stop the leak, or at least slow it down. So everything is fine for a while, but it gets worse with use over time.

The hydrant in our barn gets turned off and on four to six times a day, mostly in the morning. The one for the garden and orchard basically is turned on in the spring and off in the fall, but only has water flowing to irrigate specific places at specific times. The one for the buck pen is turned off and on once a day. The one located half way between the house and the well is used maybe twice a week during the spring and summer. In short, we use our frost proof yard hydrants in a number of places and in different ways throughout the year.

After a while the hydrants which are turned off and on the most and the ones which are turned off and on the least start to have problems, although different types.

The hydrant in the barn stopped working properly on a couple of different occasions and I had to dig it up to fix it. In the process I discovered that the rod connecting the handle at the top to the valve at the bottom was corroded so badly it wouldn’t be long before it failed. The inside of the main pipe was so rusted it probably wouldn’t be long before it also failed.  (The repair man at the local hardware store said he commonly found the same things when people brought in their yard hydrants to get fixed.) 

The hydrant for the garden and the orchard, after being left off during the fall and winter, was so stiff that my wife had a very difficult time even trying to turn it on. It got to the point where she couldn’t. I had to do that for her.

So, I finally gave up trying to fix the old style hydrants and started looking for a better way to build a yard hydrant. In casual conversation with a neighbor one afternoon he made a comment wondering why smaller water lines didn’t have valves which shut off like  larger city water lines. The valve is a simple one which you turn by using a long rod with a device on the end which has notches that insert over protrusions on the valve. You reach down into the hole, where the valve is located, insert the notches on the end of the rod into the valve handle and turn. With that idea the direction for the development of a new type of frost proof yard hydrant began in earnest. 

Such a simple idea, right? That was over five years ago and it hasn’t been as simple as it might seem to solve all the problems to make the idea into something simple and reliable which works for a yard hydrant.

After many ideas have been tried and tested using many prototypes there is now a frost proof hydrant which eliminates virtually all the problems of the old style hydrants, and has additional benefits. It’s the NEW TECH Yard Hydrant.