Episode #894
March 21, 2026
This year, my home insurance company
required me to install a Moen smart water valve.
As I stumbled upstairs after falling asleep on the couch, I habitually plugged my phone into the bedroom charger. On the screen, a warning from the Moen smart water valve app appeared.
“Low water pressure. Check your water system,” the app said. I checked the sink water. No water pressure.
The smart valve is just outside the house. This warning indicated low pressure upstream of the house. I was relieved that the valve was not sensing a leak in the house.
I put on my slippers, grabbed a flashlight, and trudged around the property in a thick, wet, foggy midnight. My first stop was the well tank.
My well pump supplies a 3000-gallon holding tank, which, in turn, supplies the landscape water system and the house via a demand pump.
When I looked at the holding tank level indicator, it read empty. Where had the water gone?
To restore pressure to the system, I bypassed the holding tank and demand pump, pressurizing the system directly from the well pump.
In the past, I have had sprinkler valves stick in the open position, flooding the yard until I found the leak and manually closed the sprinkler valve. With pressure restored, I checked all the landscape valves for the stuck-open error. None of the valves were open. The Moen app still read a slightly low supply pressure to the house. Where did the water go? What was still causing a lower pressure supply to the house?
When I bypassed the holding tank, I left the water supply to the tank running to fill it back up. This might explain the lower supply pressure, but where had the water in the tank gone?
I returned to the house and my blurry-eyed wife. I explained everything to her. She mulled it all over, and a shocked look spread over her face.
“I left the garden hose running in the hole we dug,” she said meekly. We are planting a tree in our very hard soil. The only way to dig the hole is to repeatedly fill it with water. She had simply forgotten to turn off the hose.
I went out and turned off the hose. The Moen app almost immediately showed full supply pressure. I left the tank filling overnight. In the morning, I rerouted the water through the holding tank and the demand pump. Everything was normal.
Even with a systematic analysis of a situation, some aspects can remain hidden. Thankfully, my wife was able to reveal the missing data.
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