Busted Pump

[snousle]

I hate it when things screw up. Our water went brownish for a while due to what I think was an influx of dissolved organic material, which was unsightly but not otherwise a problem as far as I can tell. But the spring is running clear again, while our tanks were full of this brown stuff, so I flushed out the upper tank, waited for it to refill, and then proceeded to flush the lower tank by pumping it out with a sump pump. The tank was nearly empty when I decided to turn it off and finish emptying it in the morning. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to me the hose continued to siphon water through the pump while it was off, so in a few hours the tank was empty. This caused the pressure booster pump to run dry and overheat. Bill discovered this late at night, and said the pumphouse was full of steam.

Ooops, there's $400 up in smoke. Coulda had dinner at the freaking French Laundry. John is out getting a new pump now, and hopefully a $40 rebuild kit will rescue the overheated one.

Hard to get things done, when random crises eat up entire days like that. It's fortunate that there's sufficient funds and three of us on hand to deal with things, at least until things get settled down and running smoothly. Which, by the way, is a very long process.

Comments

[twobraids.livejournal.com]

in my experience doing irrigation, pumps these days are treated like consumables. The motors in my submersible river pumps seem to require replacement or rebuild nearly every year.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Gah, it's awful. Fortunately the new pump was actually less than $200, but geez. Hopefully the old one can be made to work again so we'll have a spare, or we can use it on one of the agricultural tanks.

We also have a straight gravity-fed alternative should the power go out for an extended time, so it's not like we don't have any water at all, but the pressure isn't high enough to get the tankless heater to kick on. Theoretically it should be >40 PSI but the system is chronically airlocked and 900 feet of 1" pipe doesn't have very good conductance!