Actually thats wrong, I took a normal sink and vanity and converted it to be a self contained unit. Theres no plumbing in her office for a sink so she needed something self contained so she could wash her hands. This sink has two 5 gallon buckets inside the vanity with a foot operated "Whale Gusher" pump and a small water heater. Its worked well for a couple years now but recently Angie complained that it wouldn't pump.
Investigation showed that water would start to come out of the bucket but would only move so far before dropping back. I decided this meant a check valve had failed so we ordered a repair kit. I was a little nervous about this, I've never worked on a pump before, what if we'd just wasted money on the kit?
Disassembly was easy, just a few screws and it wasn't long before I found this:
That little flapper is one of two on the inlet side check valve, you can see the little dent in it. You can also see the pump in the background. The little dent was allowing water to slip past it so it wasn't doing its job of preventing the water from going back out the inlet side. The repair kit had four little flappers so I replaced both of the ones on the inlet side. The output side seemed to work fine so I left it alone. Reassembled the pump worked again, SCORE!
I wanted to tell you about this because its easy to lose your mojo and forget that you have limitless potential. I see a lot of people who "can't" do things because they won't try and that really bothers me. If I try and fail, whats the worst thing that could happen? In this case we'd buy a new pump, no big deal. Thats mostly true of life, no big deal, it didn't work, try something else...
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