Piloon, do you feed the pond water directly to your house or do you fill a cistern first and then pipe it to the house?
Also you state "One consideration is that the artesian well pump is meant to be in a vertical configuration so we build a metal 'rack' to have the pump close to vertical." Can you please quick sketch this rack or possibly even provide a pic?
Feed directly to the house.
Sorry, no pix all the pumps are in the lake. LOL
The 'rack'-:
Last one I made up was about 2' X3' of welded angle (I used bed spring angle stock, LOL) as the base with a 2-3ft 3 x 3 angle welded at about 45 deg from mid of the a 2 ft leg with 2 additional legs to the other end corners.
I then use some 4-5" jubilee clamps to attach to the 3 x 3 angle.
Shucks I have even simply wrapped copper wire around the pump while it sits in the sloped angle.
In my area our pump supplier even sells a fancier fabricated pump rack. (I copied his design, or he mine)
The concept is sort of like wearing snowshoes to not sink into the snow.
Most lake bottoms have considerable silt in the bottom and that is one main reason to build such racks.
My installation uses a swimming pool filter with fine mesh simply to filter out the fine particulates that are suspended in the lake water.
I had used box store filters with the cartridges but those clogged up in a week while the pool filter only need cleaning 2-3 times a year.
One other tip I can pass on is to ONLY use brass for all fittings and not even galvanised.
More than once when troubleshooting systems I would discover a steel fitting so clogged with rust caking that even a 3/4" would be choked down to, like 1/8" or 1/4", and that plays **** with pressure and flow.
My present 'lake pump' is now 22 years old and another is on close to 30.
The 30 is pushing 150 ft uphill and mine (22 yrs) is lower but also pumps 400 ft back via a garden hose for flowers and car washing and with good pressure. It is a 1/2 hp 12 GPM pump.
For seasonal clients that need draining every fall I install a matching "T" with a ball valve on the side leg.
This is slightly offshore in shallow water so come fall I simply open the ball valve and the whole system self drains back to the lake.
Naturally I open all taps first and let gravity do its job. The down rush of water sucks all joints and low sections perfectly dry.
Come spring one simply closes all taps and valves and simply switches power on and the whole system comes alive. OK air needs to be purged but a spring start up is a 1/2 hour job. No priming and no cussing.
'Just in case' I always attach a float to the pump in case it needs to be retrieved at a later date.
