A couple years ago I was in Amish country and wanted to buy a Baker hand pump to replace the pitcher pump that I had on my shallow well. The well is 24 feet deep with 8 feet of water and 10 feet from my greenhouse. We used it for 20 years as our primary water supply and it never went dry. I stopped at an Amish windmill shop and asked for a pump with the cylinder below the water level, so it would not freeze, and said I wanted to pump water into a bucket. The old gentleman talked to me for a few minutes, went out back and came out with a Baker pump, the sucker rod, foot valve, and the cylinder. Well I put it together. and it works perfectly and does just what it should do and does just what I asked for. With a few weeks experience using it I have been taught more about hand pumps than I ever wanted to know. If I had spent another $50 , I could have replaced the cast iron pump cylinder with a brass lined one. It is below water and will not rust out, but if you do not use it for a week or two, you will get some rusty water in the first bucket pumped and you have to dump it out. Then I found out that if I had spent a couple hundred more, 25-30 % more, I could have had a "force" pump with a seal on the pump rod, and used a garden hose and pumped the water into the greenhouse instead of carrying it. Works fine as it is, but do I want to spend the extra money to do it over. If I had asked for a pump to force water into the greenhouse, that is what he would have sold me. I was retaught a couple very important things. Use your preps before you need them and while you can still learn how to use them , can get the bugs out, and have easy access to any corrections you have to make. The more important lesson is how many "wrong" questions have I asked in making my preps and what other right answer, wrong question problems are there waiting to be found .
As we know, knowing what to ask is sometimes hard. As much as I love the generator that I purchased 4 years ago, if I knew better at the time I would have asked about the types of connections. [It has the traditional 3 prong USA connections.] If I purchase a generator in 2016 or 2017, I will make sure that it has a NEMA L14-30 (see Amazon.com : Socket, NEMA L14-30 30 Amp, 125/250V Twist Lock : Patio, Lawn & Garden for an image if you like). This I will eventually use to connect to the house via a transfer switch. So, we all learn from our mistakes, but if you can learn from someone else's mistake it's usually cheaper!
