How deep to place submersible pump

[Cheryl Chen]

Hello everyone,

We recently drilled a 400 ft well on our land and it produces 5GPM and the static water level is at 125 feet. I'm looking to self install a solar powered submersible pump. I plan to hand install it and so won't be able to handle installing all the way down to 400 feet and so am thinking of getting a pump that can sit at 200-250 feet or so and that will pump around 3-4 GPM.

I'm planning to have a cistern up top so we have plenty of water to access on-demand.

Does anyone see an issue with installing a pump mid way in the well? All the reading I've done is where the pump is installed pretty much towards the bottom in order to access the entire water columns but since I will have a cistern I'm not worried about that. I'm more concerned about saving on the cost of the pump and being able to install it myself.

Thank you in advance for your time and advice!

Cheryl

 

[Reach4]

The pump does not pump significantly harder if placed at 300 ft down vs 200 ft down. Its the lift from the water surface that matters rather than the distance to the pump.

Deeper pump does let you keep going where you might have run out of water at a shallower distance.

In regular pumps, 1/2 HP 7 gpm pump would be efficient bringing water if the surface is 125 ft down but could still bring water if the water surface fell to 280. At that point, the flow would drop to maybe 4 or 5 gpm due to the higher lift. It would probably be a little cheaper than a 5 gpm pump. Most submersible pumps are going to be at least 1/2 HP in non-solar. Maybe in solar they come in smaller size.

You could control how much the pump brings up each run by how you set the float switch. By pumping more than the 5 gpm you think the well can do continuously, you would be relying on some storage in the well.

How big is your well diameter?

The pump being lower means more to lift when pulling the pump, and the more wire you need.

What kind of pump were you considering? Lorentz? Grundos SQflex?

I am not a pro.