Sprinkler Pump from my Pond advice needed.

[ponytug]

I looked at a house on a well the other day. We passed because of really low water pressure.

Pressure tank was installed at the well. Had good pressure there.

Dawned on me on the way home, that the pressure loss was due to the 100ft plus worth of distance after the pressure tank. Was no telling what size line was used to run from the well to the house either.

Realtor told me that he showed another house we were interested in down the street. Said that house had even worse water pressure.

I wonder if it's a regional thing. But before this place we looked at and the other place down the street. I've always seen the pressure tank either close to the house or inside the house when on a well.

Sounds like both the sellers had made poor choices in plumbing; either pipes that were too small, or pipes that corroded (becoming smaller), or both. Easy fix, and might be worth exploring, if you like the houses. My view on those sorts of items is that it is worth horse trading the seller on it. Sometimes they have their heart set in a sales number and will do the fix, and other times they don't want the unknown hassle of fixing it, and will settle for less. We looked at another house with "dry rot" on the inspection report. Not really. The dishwasher flooded, and the "dry rot" was hard water deposits on the underside of the floor. The wood was fine. But the sellers thought that they were selling a problem house, as did other buyers.

We looked at home once that had a trickle of water from a spring, and was called out as being a problem. I looked at the pipe feeding the main water tank, yup, a trickle. Then again it was corroded galvanized pipe, encrusted with hard water deposits. The whole line back to the spring was half inch galvanized, and every joint was thick with rust and corrosion. My bet was that there wasn't much more than a pencil thickness inside. Easy fix: new poly pipe.

The overflow from the spring was in the tens of gallons per minute category. I am always amazed what folks put up with.

All the best,

Peter

 

[Ken45101]

I looked at a house on a well the other day. We passed because of really low water pressure.

Pressure tank was installed at the well. Had good pressure there.

Dawned on me on the way home, that the pressure loss was due to the 100ft plus worth of distance after the pressure tank. Was no telling what size line was used to run from the well to the house either.

Realtor told me that he showed another house we were interested in down the street. Said that house had even worse water pressure.

I wonder if it's a regional thing. But before this place we looked at and the other place down the street. I've always seen the pressure tank either close to the house or inside the house when on a well.

Pressure loss is strictly a function of pipe size and elevation change. Many builders do not understand that long supply line needs to be larger diameter even if the supply is only feeding a 1/2" garden hose.

The previous owner here installed our water line and wisely chose to put in a 2" line from the roadside utility connection. We have about 1800' of water line and a 150' elevation gain from the road to the house. The yard hydrant here has 45 psi with the hydrant full open (about 5 gpm IIRC). We lose 75 psi due to elevation gain with 120 psi at the road.

Figure about 0.5 psi per foot of elevation gain. Reducing the line diameter by half will increase the pressure drop (due to friction) by a factor of 4 or more.

 

[Dftodd]

Pressure loss is strictly a function of pipe size and elevation change. Many builders do not understand that long supply line needs to be larger diameter even if the supply is only feeding a 1/2" garden hose.

The previous owner here installed our water line and wisely chose to put in a 2" line from the roadside utility connection. We have about 1800' of water line and a 150' elevation gain from the road to the house. The yard hydrant here has 45 psi with the hydrant full open (about 5 gpm IIRC). We lose 75 psi due to elevation gain with 120 psi at the road.

Figure about 0.5 psi per foot of elevation gain. Reducing the line diameter by half will increase the pressure drop (due to friction) by a factor of 4 or more.

I actually deal with that on a daily basis with centrifugal pumps. Just not on a well. That's why it didn't dawn on me till later what the issue was. I actually sent a message to the realtor the next day to let him know what the issue was with those two places and the low water pressure.

The second place we looked at had a new well pump and pressure tank installed the previous year. I wonder if they used the existing line.

Figure there was only a 20ft to 30ft rise in elevation from the well and pressure tank. But was probably 150ft to the tub that I checked the water pressure at.

That's an awful long way it would seem from the pressure tank.

 

[Dftodd]

Sounds like both the sellers had made poor choices in plumbing; either pipes that were too small, or pipes that corroded (becoming smaller), or both. Easy fix, and might be worth exploring, if you like the houses. My view on those sorts of items is that it is worth horse trading the seller on it. Sometimes they have their heart set in a sales number and will do the fix, and other times they don't want the unknown hassle of fixing it, and will settle for less. We looked at another house with "dry rot" on the inspection report. Not really. The dishwasher flooded, and the "dry rot" was hard water deposits on the underside of the floor. The wood was fine. But the sellers thought that they were selling a problem house, as did other buyers.

We looked at home once that had a trickle of water from a spring, and was called out as being a problem. I looked at the pipe feeding the main water tank, yup, a trickle. Then again it was corroded galvanized pipe, encrusted with hard water deposits. The whole line back to the spring was half inch galvanized, and every joint was thick with rust and corrosion. My bet was that there wasn't much more than a pencil thickness inside. Easy fix: new poly pipe.

The overflow from the spring was in the tens of gallons per minute category. I am always amazed what folks put up with.

All the best,

Peter

We didn't have our heart set on either place. It would have been a decent compromise. We liked the area (middle of the woods). One was a 5 acre lot the other was on a 6 acre lot.

There's actually a 5 acre lot out there for sale somewhere. So we haven't ruled out purchasing a piece of property, and building as well.

The market here in our area is the wild west, so Plan A is a house with property. B is a modular with property. C is a piece of property and building.
D is a fifth wheel camper under a large awning on a piece of property

 

[5030]

D is a fifth wheel camper under a large awning on a piece of property

Scratch D. Amy and I lived in our RV on site while we had our old farm house gutted to the frame and rebuilt (I wanted to tear it down and build a new home), she didn't. Guess who won???

Anyway. living in an RV for 5 months is no joy. Nice for the first week or so and then, you'll hate it.

 

[3Ts]

Scratch D. Amy and I lived in our RV on site while we had our old farm house gutted to the frame and rebuilt (I wanted to tear it down and build a new home), she didn't. Guess who won???

Anyway. living in an RV for 5 months is no joy. Nice for the first week or so and then, you'll hate it.

It depends on your objective. We lived in ours for 4 years until we found a piece of property and built our cabin. Granted 2 of those years were travelling the country with 2 objectives. 1) To see the country and 2) find a place we wanted to be our forever place. Once we purchased a piece of land we camped on it while we got utilities brought in and a barn built so we had all our household goods on site. Then we started our cabin. We were glad to get out of the trailer but it was tolerable because we could see the progress of the cabin and knew we were in the RV only a little longer.

 

[EddieWalker]

Here is what I use;

Voltage Drop Calculator | Southwire

www.southwire.com

The underlying question is how much will the total draw be out there in the future.

I would be tempted to put a pressure tank up by the house, but the pressure switch by the pump for ease of wiring and control. If you would ever want fire water protection, I would pump up to a 10,000 gallon tank by the garden/house with a hydrant for fire fighting, and plumb the garden for low pressure gravity feed.

We had something similar as a kid, and my $0.02 is plumb the pipe from the pump for at least twice the flow; people seem to routinely underestimate the friction losses in pipe and the impact of couplings and elbows, and then blame the pump for low performance.

Have you thought about a floating intake, or are you planning to bury a pipe in the pond?

All the best,

Peter

Thank you for the link. If I understand it correctly, I have 200 amps and 240 volts at the breaker at my meter. If I use 2AWG Aluminum for 1,000 feet, I'll have 75 amps at the end of the run and a 14.7% voltage drop, or about 36 volts. That leaves me with 204 volts, which isn't enough.

I've looking on Youtube to see how others have done their intakes and what I like the best is kind of a L shape with the pipe laying on the floor for of the pond and the intake facing straight up. They add a couple of T's the the line to keep the intake in the upright position. In my crazy thinking plans, I'm considering adding wheels to it so it goes in and comes out easier. My thinking is that to drain everything fully, I'll need to pull it out of the lake in the Fall. Worse that I've seen is about 2 inches of ice on the pond.

 

[EddieWalker]

The voltage drop for #2 aluminum wire at 900' and 12 amps is 17.3 volts which is 2.9% loss. This is considered acceptable because it is less than 3%, but is very close to your limit. If you get a pump that draws 30 amps you'll be way over what is considered acceptable voltage drop. I realize that conduit is expensive, but I recommend that you use it and put underground cable inside it (not above ground cable). (The conduit will collect water!). And it should be 2' down.

Instead of buying from Lowe's you may have to go to the electrical wholesalers that the electricians use. They are more expensive, but will have larger wire.

If you use aluminum wire, the terminals it is connected to have to be rated for aluminum wire and an anti-oxidation paste needs to be used. The problem with aluminum wire is that it expands and contracts more than copper when it is heated which causes the connection to loosen which causes more heating, thus the reason to be sure the terminals are rated for aluminum.

Thank you. This is something that needs to work for decades, so I'm willing to spend what it takes to do it right. The aluminum was my starting point in figuring this out. If you needed 220 volts and 30 amps 100 feet away, what would you use?

I own a trencher and a backhoe, so putting the wire in the ground isn't a problem. I'm unsure what the advantage is to using conduit? My soil is hard packed red clay. There are no gophers or moles here.

 

[EddieWalker]

...also, your link to the pump is bad....

Sorry about that. I edited my original post with the correct link to Amazon. The pump that I like so far is a Red Lion RL-SPRK-200-BR that's 2HP and rated for 77GPH with a Brass Impeller for $589

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Lion-Imp...b-4b22-846a-166eee7f2613&ref_=pd_gw_ci_mcx_mi

 

[EddieWalker]

Simplify. Gasoline pump to a storage tank or several located near the need.

For the kind of money you're talking about, you could rig up a fairly nice 2 or 3" pump, maybe even with electric start and all the buried pipe and valves necessary. Stock tanks of various sizes and shapes are available and you could build houses for them if appearance is an issue.

Run the pump to fill the tanks, then use gravity feed out of the tanks.

I have a gas pump that works pretty good, but it requires adding gasoline to it daily, and changing the oil once a week.

This system will be all automatic and run every night for a set period of time to water all of my wife's gardens. Currently we have 24 raised beds, and thousands of dollars worth of flowers. Our long term plan is to increase the number of raised beds every year until we run out of room. My guess is that we'll end up with around 60 of them. Once built, they are easy to take care of, but expensive and time consuming to water. Pumping from the pond will make this simple and affordable once I get past the cost of making it happen.