Stuck pump trying to drop

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Piku

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Hello all, today I figured out my well pump was running dry (while using a LOT of water) so back to the drawing board -

Back story, I bought a foreclosure in Bradenton, FL that had a 5" well casing, open to the air with no cap, and nothing else. No idea if there is a pump down there or anything else. Found the permits and the well was drilled to 380Ft, casing depth 80 feet, original pump set at 80ft, water at 30ft recovery 25GPM with final level at 50ft. That's part of why my 18GPM pump running it dry was surprising. The well is 15 years old.

Anyway, when I installed the pump I opted to do it myself to save some money. I used some of the savings to try the cycle stop valve which seems to work rather well. I did my best to fish all the frogs out and got to work. It's on 1" poly pipe and I originally decided to set it at 100ft for simplicity sake (the pipe came in a 100ft roll). The pump is a 4" 1HP 18GPM pump. When I got to around 90ft I got stuck and wasn't able to drop the pump any lower. The pump would kind of stick and if I rotated it I could sometimes get it slightly deeper but basically it wasn't going any further. So I pulled the pump, cut off a few feet and set it at 85 feet. The bottom of the pump motor was nicely scratched up from my efforts.

According to a friend of mine the casing is driven into the bedrock and as a result the bottom deforms and kind of forms a cone shape. He said he was able to get his in deeper by strong coersion but my imagination about getting the pump back out later on prevented me from taking any serious measures. Now I'm wondering if I should have.

First, does anyone familiar with the area think I should set the pump deeper or should I simply just use less water (I was really flowing it wide open for about 10-15 minutes)?

Secondly does the cone shaped casing end theory make sense or could it be something else? Maybe the pipe from the old pump.... Might have to pay the well guy after all to get a camera down there. I have an endoscope but it is only 15 meters long. Everything looks healthy at that depth (I did hit water for only 2-3 feet with that which suggests our water level is at 50 feet and not 30 feet, so I only have 30 feet of water above the pump).

Thanks for any and all advice!
 

Craigpump

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No. The pipe will not deform into a cone if a hardened drove shoe was used on the casing. However, if they drove the pipe through a dirty hole or drilled and drove the pipe in through gravels into the bedrock, the pipe above the shoe could become crimped. If the drive shoe wasn't welded on, it could have gotten knocked off while driving the pipe in. It's also possible the pipe isn't all the way in the rock socket and there is a step or dogleg in the well.

The only way to know for sure is to run a Downhole camera in and look.
 

Valveman

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An 18 GPM pump running wide open can easily do 30 GPM, which is even more that the supposed recovery rate. I would pump the well dry as you did, wait 1/2 hour and pump the well dry again while timing the run time. If the pump runs for 15 minutes at 30 GPM, you have a recovery rate of about 15 GPM. With the CSV all you need to know is this number, then you can adjust your watering conditions to 15 GPM or less. You can do a lot of watering with 15 GPM, and a lot of people would love to have that kind of water.
 

Piku

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craigpump looks like I didn't mention it but the casing is PVC, so I don't know what the end of a PVC casing looks like. Do they use a drive point like in a sand point well?
 

Piku

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An 18 GPM pump running wide open can easily do 30 GPM, which is even more that the supposed recovery rate. I would pump the well dry as you did, wait 1/2 hour and pump the well dry again while timing the run time. If the pump runs for 15 minutes at 30 GPM, you have a recovery rate of about 15 GPM. With the CSV all you need to know is this number, then you can adjust your watering conditions to 15 GPM or less. You can do a lot of watering with 15 GPM, and a lot of people would love to have that kind of water.

Thanks. I figured an 18GPM pump would do 18GPM(!). Perhaps it was flowing much more. It was going straight out a short 5/8 garden hose. As soon as I restricted the flow it immediately recovered and it didn't run that way for more than a few seconds. Hopefully the pump is undamaged. It just surprised me after a long life of city water and before that well water in the past in Pennsylvania when we would have had to try very very hard to use more water than the recovery rate. That said the flow out of the garden hose is pretty exceptional. valveman, side question, how long should the pump take to shut off upon total shutoff of flow? When I first installed the CSV with the pressure switch supplied at 60/40 it took quite a while to shut off, maybe 2 minutes. At some points it looked like it simply wouldn't reach the shutoff pressure at all and the gauge just stopped moving. I dropped it down to 56-58psi using the adjustment and now it shuts off within 30 seconds or so reliably. I'm curious if the CSV restricts the flow more the higher it gets towards the shutoff pressure or if (perhaps more likely) the high volume pump just can't build up the higher head pressure.

I just decided to measure it and it appears to have been flowing something close to 50GPM(!).. Impressive and clearly operator error.
 

Valveman

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Thanks. I figured an 18GPM pump would do 18GPM(!). Perhaps it was flowing much more. It was going straight out a short 5/8 garden hose. As soon as I restricted the flow it immediately recovered and it didn't run that way for more than a few seconds. Hopefully the pump is undamaged. It just surprised me after a long life of city water and before that well water in the past in Pennsylvania when we would have had to try very very hard to use more water than the recovery rate. That said the flow out of the garden hose is pretty exceptional. valveman, side question, how long should the pump take to shut off upon total shutoff of flow? When I first installed the CSV with the pressure switch supplied at 60/40 it took quite a while to shut off, maybe 2 minutes. At some points it looked like it simply wouldn't reach the shutoff pressure at all and the gauge just stopped moving. I dropped it down to 56-58psi using the adjustment and now it shuts off within 30 seconds or so reliably. I'm curious if the CSV restricts the flow more the higher it gets towards the shutoff pressure or if (perhaps more likely) the high volume pump just can't build up the higher head pressure.

I just decided to measure it and it appears to have been flowing something close to 50GPM(!).. Impressive and clearly operator error.

A 1HP, 18 GPM pump, pumping from 50' can build 86 PSI max. So with a 40/60 pressure switch the CSV is getting the flow down to about 1/2 GPM to fill the tank. How long it takes to fill the tank depends on the size of the tank. 30 seconds to 1 minute is what you want for run time, so you should be good.
 
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