Four hours of preparation for fifteen seconds of implementation.

As of this morning, I still had that chlorine cylinder with the bad valve hanging over my head. It was kind of time to shit or get off the pot. I could still get brownie points for taking care of the problem, but I could see that letting it sit there would look bad for me, even though that was not my fault.

Fortunately, the manufacturer came out today with both the equipment to handle it and men who deal with this stuff every day.

Their big game plan was to lower the temperature in the cylinder to below the boiling point of chlorine, and for that, we’d need dry ice.

So dry ice they had, twenty pounds of it.

They unhooked the cylinder, still wearing the chlorinator, and put it in a plastic drum, plopped in the dry ice, and added water.

Twenty minutes later, and we’d had a real nice fog show, but the cylinder hadn’t even started to frost up. Not cold enough! The consensus was that there wasn’t nearly enough ice, and the water was making it warmer, not colder.

So off we went to find more dry ice. We started with the grocery store where they’d got the first batch, and cleaned them out. Seventy pounds worth. We got a few raised eyebrows, but this was my regular grocery store, so they more or less recognized me.

Back we go, out to the site, empty out the drum, and dump that load in. The new batch of ice filled it up about three-quarters of the way, and was clearly working down on the bottom. Ah-HA! We need more!

So off we went again, to the two other stores in town. Nothing. We drove all the way in to the next town, hoping that what we had started around the cylinder wasn’t melting away too much. And they had plenty, so we bought another hundred pounds, and earned us many strange looks.

Finally, we got back to the site, and wrapped the tank with all of the rest of the ice, slapping the big chunks up around the top of it and using duct tape to hold it on. There isn’t anything that can’t be helped with a little duct tape. We wrapped that pretty assembly in a tarp I had in the toolbox, and then it was time to wait and give it a chance to work.

So wait, we did. I mostly entertained myself by playing with the bits of dry ice that had scattered, poking them into puddles with my foot and taking pictures. You all do not want to know how many pictures of white blobs I ended up with today. That shit is fun, man.

Eventually they deemed it good enough, and put their respirators on and shooed the rest of us out of the enclosure. Fine by me. They whipped that chlorinator off of that cylinder and slapped a cap on it quicker than the shutter of my camera. I never even caught a whiff of chlorine.

So there it was, with its fancy transport cap, all finished. Five days worth of stress; three different companies, counting my own; and a hundred and ninety pounds of dry ice. I didn’t even realize how stressed I was about it until I got home tonight and found my jaw sore from clenching it. I didn’t feel worried at the time, but I guess it was eating at me.

And the ironic part was, while they were putting the safety cap on it, I was hooking my chlorinator back up to another cylinder so I could use the well. And of course, I caused a chlorine leak, bigger than they had. I just held my breath and stuck my arm back in real quick-like to turn off that cylinder, as we usually do. But it’s not a huge deal to do that with a functioning valve; it’s a potential problem when there’s no valve holding a hundred and twenty pounds of chlorine back. (A fitting had loosened with the temperature changed–I got it fixed and running again no problem.)