water pressure

tanner · Apr 8, 2002

We are newbies to country living and are having water pressure problems. We bought four acres just over a year ago, finished building a house about two months ago, and are desperately trying to get grass started. We have learned that there is not enough water pressure from the well to run a sprinkler. No water pressure problems in the house; however, the sprinklers will not rotate effectively (even when only one sprinkler is connected!). Is there a cost-effective method to increase the water pressure? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Argee · Apr 8, 2002

You didn't mention what your water pressure is. I keep mine around 60 lbs. Usually, near or on your pressure tank is the a pressure switch. Remove the cover and with a nut driver or small socket turn the nut clockwise to increase pressure.

TWINKLE_TOES · Apr 8, 2002

tanner,

With a little more information, might be able to help. What is the configuration of your water system, pressure tank size and setting? Line sizes and lengths?
This link may be of help.
<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.tractorbynet.com/cgi-bin/compact/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=rural&Number=77326&page=&view=&sb=&o=&vc=1>Calculating GPM</A>
This is an quick and easy head loss calculator. <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.geocities.com/Eureka/Concourse/3075/hazen2.html>Head Loss Calculator</A>
Al

TonyC · Apr 9, 2002

If you want a simple solution that isn't fancy just buy a water pump. I got one at Northern Supply for $34.00. Just hook the hose to it, hook a hose to the egress and plug it in. You will need a couple of inexpensive adaptors to do this. You could just mount it to a board an use it portably. If your well will keep up with it on volume it will turn those sprinklers!

TresCrows · Apr 9, 2002

Join the club, I am on rural water which sometimes means no water. I always thought the South was supposed to be backwards but here I am in Kansaw and they don't got running water--.
I drilled a well but unfortunately the wells in the area around my house average 10GPM. Mine is exactly that--10GPM. The submersible pump puts out about 80PSI. I use a 80 gallon accumulator tank with a pressure switch set for 50/30 operation. Kicks off at 50 and on at 30. Between the water stored in the tank and the water stored in the well I can get about 30 to 50 minutes of high flow rate but at some point and that point depends upon how much water I am drawing and how fast the 10GPM well cannot keep up and the well will draw down and the tank will go down and the submersible pump will suck air and cavitate. Sustained flow cannot exceed the 10GPM. Regulating to a lower pressure is one way to make a low GPM well more efficient. For example, a given sprinkler head may draw 3 GPM at 30 PSI, 5 GPM at 50 PSI and 8 at 80 PSI (just making up numbers for the example). Most sprinklers are designed for about 30 to 35 PSI and some will say operating pressure 20 to 50 PSI (for example). If the sprinkler functions at 30 PSI and you have a 12 GPM well then you could run exactly 4 sprinklers using 3 GPM at 30 PSI, if you boosted the pressure (via the accumulator tank and pressure switch) to 50 PSI then you could only run 2 sprinklers. I have my pressure set and 50/30 but I also installed 25 PSI resrictors in my sprinklers. I can run three of the 3GPM heads, impulse type. Without the restrictors I can run only 2.
Some people near me who have only a well and no rural water have drilled and linked together as many as three wells. Three wells, say 10 GPM, 15 GPM and 7 GPM is 32 GPM, expensive but needed. My 100 foot, gravel packed and cased well with bibb, cap, and 1/2 horsepower submersible pump (and associated plumbing) ran just shy of 2,000 dollars. Latter this Summer I will drill a second well on the east side of my property and tie them together, they will both run to my accumulator tank.
Good luck.
J

Devildog · Apr 9, 2002

Argee,
The only other thing I could add is if you have a bladder tank and you adjust the pressure, Make sure you adjust the PSI in the bladder acording to what manufacturer requires.

Also Welcome aboard
__________________________________________
Take care, Jim

heehaw · Apr 9, 2002

if the problem is a low producing well, its solved fairly easily. around here we install 1000 gal sealed tanks, the pump in the well keeps the tank full, and we take the water from the tank; if we have what the ole timers referred to as "copperous" water, which i think is also referred to as irony water, we install some gravel and sand in the tank and filter the water, walla, plenty of water and its doesn't stain the fixtures. i have seen stores put in as many as 3, 1000 gal tanks to take care of their water shortage problem. if its just low pressure, but you have plenty of water, the previous answers covered that quite well..good luck
heehaw

looch · Apr 9, 2002

No water pressure problems in the house

Without knowing the age of your house all I can say is that we have a similar problem. Our house is over a hundred years old and at some point galvanized pipe was used. The plumbing system is a friggin's mess right now. Bits and pieces were added willy-nilly over the last 50 years. I have galvanized, copper, and PVC pipe throughout. Even when the PVC was added it wasn't done properly - I have 1/2" pipe feeding my upstairs bathroom. The sections that have galvanized pipe - this includes the external spigget - do not produce much pressure because they are clogged with rust and mineral deposits.

WVBill · Apr 9, 2002

Tanner:

I have experienced exactly the same thing.

We moved into our house on 4 acres with a well 3 years ago. Water pressure and flow in the house is OK (although you can certainly tell in the shower when the pump cycles in and builds up the pressure in the pressure tank). But the AVERAGE pressure just wasn't enough to effectively run sprinklers.

Here's what I found:
The well pump is strong enough to put out pressure up to at least the cut-off point in the pressure tank. There is some flow rate at which the pump will not be able to reach the cut-off point pressure.

If we turned on MORE sprinklers, the pump would kick in and pump up the pressure - but never be able to quite reach the cut-off pressure of the tank - thus it would keep up that pressure forever (again, we have a very good well with no flow problems {knock wood, cross fingers, etc. etc.}). It does not damage the pump to run it for long periods - pump life is rated in on-off cycles not in hours of pumping.

So our solution was to run two sprinklers at the same time using 5/8" hose to achieve max flow and allow the pump to run continuously at its max pressure.

hwp · Apr 9, 2002

Does your system have water filters on it? If so, when were they last changed?

patrickg · Apr 9, 2002

Hey Tres Crows! 10 gal/min is luxury man. We think we are lucky when we can maintain 7 1/2 for a reasonable time. If they weren't puting in rural water here as this is being written, I'd be lookin' to drill another well. I put out 600 ft of soaker hose (the porous black recycled tire kind) and all hose and soaker was downhill from spigot. I took the end cap off to purge air and speed the onset of watering. No water would run out the end. All the water dripped out of the soaker before any got to the end. I have 50-20 hi-lo pressure switch. Water is adequate for house and will squirt from a hose nozzle but 450 ft is about max soaker length that will deliver water to the end of the line. So I put 6 ea. 75 ft soakers on one branch and two on another and have them take turns. Works fine but must turn down the water when only feeding two to prevent spraying instead of dripping.

If I were hard over for sprinklers (I'm not, I bought some but they didn't work worth diddly, even a rainbird due to low pressure/volume situation) I'd favor the solution a previous poster sugested, an in-line pump. It would have to be set up to cycle on and off otherwise it would drain my pressure tank in short order and do nothing but risk burn out. I would recommend that solution. Use an inline pump but test to insure that it doesn't outrun the well pump. If it does then set it up to run for say 2/3 the time to empty the well tank and then off for say 4/3 (133%) the time it takes the well tank to recover from being empty, fill up, come to full pressure, and shut off. This is just a guess but if there are other demands on the well you don't want to cut it too close.

A better approach and one that automatically compensates would be to put a relay on the pressure switch that controls the well pump. Use that relay to controll the in-line pump that drives the sprinklers. That way the in-line pump would only run when the well pump wasn't which would avoid out running the well pump and the associated problems. If you have a problem with water coming out of the sprinklers while the in-line pump is off and over watering near the sprinklers, then put an electrically controlled water valve like in dishwashers and home laundry washers in the line up stream of the in-line pump and wire it to the relay contacts on the relay that I suggested to control the in-line pump. Use the contacts that are de-energized when the in-line pump is off. Said another way, in case I haven't confused you enough... The water control valve should be turned off (no water flow) when the in-line pump is off but yo might not want to use the same contacts on the relay because...

You might choose to run the in-line pump on 220-240 volts and the water control solenoid thingy from an appliance made for 120 volts (unless you get a European market unit as they mostly use 220 volts)

Enough explaining! If anyone wants a schematic just ask and I will scrawl one out, scan, and post.

Patrick

tanner · Apr 9, 2002

The water pressure is at 30 psi and then jumps to 45 psi when water is being used. I'll adjust it up to about 60 psi.
Thanks.
Greg

tanner · Apr 9, 2002

Sounds like a great low cost solution. Will the well keep up? What capacity pump do you use?
Thanks!

TonyC · Apr 9, 2002

Will the well keep up?

Don't know. I don't use mine on a well, in fact I've never had a well. Maybe someone else can help with that one.

What capacity pump do you use?

Mine is 720 GPH...you can look at the exact pump I have <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.northerntool.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ProductDisplay?prrfnbr=7738&prmenbr=6970>here</A>

If you search their site they have others that are more powerful and more expensive. I also use this pump to move rainwater in my greenhouse. The 55 gal drums are collected outside and the motor is inside. The hose fires just like it is hooked to the house!

Argee · Apr 9, 2002

tanner..
Adjust it so the high end of the limit (pump shut off) is 60lbs..

You may need to set your low end up also...When I had my well put in, the guy that set the pressure tank and did the hook up bypassed the high end the during the initial filling to "stretch the bladder" in the tank. He ran it up to about 70lbs., said this would encourage it to hold the high end pressure. Haven't had a problem in six years. I wonder if your tank bladder has enough "stretch".

My tank and control is in the back of my shop, when I built the house I installed another tank there. Now I have more volume and longer periods between pump runs. Worth considering if your using it to water your lawn.

Personally, I don't use my well to water the lawn. Not worth the well going dry to have a green lawn. Besides if I water it, I have to mow it more often. If it looks green from the road, it's green enough for me.

TresCrows · Apr 10, 2002

Patrick, I am new to this well thing. I only use my well for irrigation. My house runs on rural water. I am going to rig a manifold so I can switch over to well water for the house in event of an emergency. I read your post several times and I am not sure I understand. I have a pressure guage at my well head and it reads 80 psi when flowing about 8GPM and about 60 or more at 10 GPM and I can let it run at 10GPM continuously--24 hours a day if need be. Soooo, I am not sure how your pump does not have adequate pressure. I installed pressure reducers at my sprinklers. I do not have a sprinkler system, just lots of hoses running everywhere--for now. My pressure switch kicks on the well pump and it will maintain the 50/30 cycle indefinitly as long as I do not pull more than 10GPM average. It is kinda confusing--I need to think about this some more. Before I installed the 5 dollar pressure reducers in my impulse sprinklers looked like rockets and would fall over and scoot along the ground. I could only run two also without depeleting the well. Now with the 25 psi reducers I can run 3 and they behave normally.
I hope the rural water works out for you. Ours is OK but there is rarely more than 20 PSI or so and often much less. I timed the flow rate into a bucket on a good day and it was exactly 4.7 GPM. With two hoses running the rate drops to about 3.5 and with three hoses it drops less than 2. The water quality is fine it seems, a little hard. I have not had the well long enough to access it's water quality though I imagine it will be rather hard.
Good luck.
J

ejb · Apr 10, 2002

>>Does your system have water filters on it? If so, when were they last changed?

Good point....after moving into my place a few years ago my wife noticed a decreasing amount of water pressure of the months we were her (I am oblivious to these things) and finally complained enough to spur me into action.

There was a water-filter on here that look like it had not been changed in years...plunked in a new cartridge and voila...instant water pressure.

ejb · Apr 10, 2002

How would you go about installing on of these 1000 gallon tanks into an existing system? i.e. what modifications would you need to do to an existing pump system to get it all working...I like the idea. At what point would you install the 100 gallon tank, i.e. before the bladder housing and water filter after both etc?

It seems that you would want to add another pump after the tank in order to improve pressure...anything else? I could see the new pump would be the one that kicks on when water is demanded, but what causes the tank to stay full? Some sort of float valve?

heehaw · Apr 10, 2002

i've seen it done two ways, one was with a well with low supply of water, the pump in the well was put on a timer, so it would pump 2 minutes out of every hour, or however long it could without draining the well. it did this 24/7, and that was enough to keep the tank full, if the folks went away for a wk-end, it would overflow the tank. the other way is with a float to shut the water off when the tank is full. the tank is installed directly after the well, and another pump is used to pump from the tank to the house, going thru additional filters if needed. i have a lot of iron in my well, but plenty of water, so i have a 7ft long, 3ft wide and 3ft tall tank that the well goes into, thru the sand/gravel then another pump to the house, its worked for 16 years now.
heehaw