We close Bridgewater camps and rental cottages for the winter — pump down, lines blown out with compressed air, traps and toilets treated, a written record left behind — and we open them again in spring before the first renters pull in. If you run more than one cottage, we’ll do the whole row on one visit.
A lot of the east shore of Newfound in Bridgewater isn’t single houses. It’s clusters. Cottage colonies that go back generations, a row of camps down a point road that rent by the week from June through foliage, places on Whittemore Point that families have split among cousins for fifty years. Off Route 3A there’s a full RV campground, too. Closing that kind of property is a different job from closing one house: six small systems instead of one big one, each with its own quirks, and a written list for each, because the person who opens cottage four in May won’t remember what was different about it.
The spring side has its own clock. NHDES runs the state dam at the Bristol outlet on a schedule it has kept since 1982 — the lake is brought up to its peak by the first of June, held through the summer, and let down in the fall. The lake association points out the catch: Newfound rises roughly fourteen inches for every inch of rain, faster than the dam can let it out. A wet May can put the waterline up to a dock spigot or an outdoor shower drain before anybody’s turned the water on.
So the opening order matters here. Shoreline fixtures and lake-draw lines first, while they’re easy to reach and the water is still coming up. Then the cottages, one by one, slow, with somebody watching each fitting as it takes pressure. The first renters of the season should find a working shower. Not a puddle.
If you rent your Bridgewater cottages by the week, tape the shutdown sheet inside the electrical panel of each one. Next May, whoever opens cottage four will thank you.
Each unit gets the full treatment. Pump off and the pressure tank drained, or the feed line closed and drained where several cottages share a well. Every line blown out with compressed air at low, controlled pressure — gravity alone leaves water lying in every horizontal run. Water heater drained and shut down. Non-toxic RV antifreeze in every trap, every toilet bowl and tank, every floor drain. Then the extras that rental cottages pile up: outdoor showers, a dishwasher somebody added in 2009, a washer in the shed, the hose bib at the dock.
What makes a row harder isn’t any one cottage. It’s that no two are the same. One was plumbed in the fifties and another was redone last spring, and a shared well with a long buried run to the far end behaves differently from a pump in every basement. We map each one the first year. After that, closing is faster, and so is opening, and the owner has a binder that outlasts any one caretaker.
Spring is the visit that pays. Charging a system slowly and watching it catches a cracked fitting while it’s dripping instead of after it ran all night under a renter’s bed. We’ll open places we didn’t close. We ask more questions when we do.
Closing a one-bathroom Bridgewater camp is $400. Two or more bathrooms starts at $1,000. A row of rental cottages is priced per unit once we’ve walked it, with the shared-well and shoreline extras counted in. Spring opening runs below the closing, and most owners book both at once.
Yes, and that’s the efficient way. We map each cottage the first year — where its water comes from, what it has that the others don’t — and leave a written sheet for each. After that the shutdown goes faster every year, and so does the spring opening.
Earlier than you’d guess if you have shoreline fixtures. The state brings Newfound up to its peak by June first, and the lake can rise about fourteen inches for every inch of rain. Get waterfront lines and dock bibs charged and checked while they’re easy to reach, then open the cottages.
It changes the order. The shared pump and tank get handled first and last, and the long feed line out to the far units needs a proper blow-out of its own — that buried run is where water likes to sit. We’ll map where the line goes if nobody knows.
That’s how cottages crack. Opening taps drains what gravity can reach and leaves water in every low run, every trap, and every appliance with a reservoir. Compressed air clears the lines; antifreeze protects the traps. One cold night finds anything you missed.
Not usually, as long as the heat is on and nothing has frozen yet. Book the date before the season gets busy, though — every rental owner on the lake wants the same week. If the weather turns early, we can close the outlying units first and the main cottage last.
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