Arktikos
New Member
Hi everyone, new here first post so a small intro is in order. I am retired, live in a very small and isolated community in SE Alaska and am building a home here to relax and catch halibut and salmon etc etc and did I mention relax? Anyway the wife and I are doing everything ourselves on the house (not a LOT of relaxing, but sometimes satisfying). Back in September a well driller from another town was here doing wells and we had ours drilled. 260 feet and only a half gallon a minute. We already had a cistern set up before when we were hauling our water so kept that tank set up and ran the well straight to the cistern tank without any pressure tank, just a float switch that would fire up the pump when the level would drop 50 gal.
This seemed to work like a dream for the first month or so and then yesterday a fuse blew in the disconnect switch. I replaced the fuse and put an amp probe on the 2 hots and sure enough one was drawing 6 amps and the other a whopping 17.5! The half horse pump still runs and pumps water but I have to keep a 20a fuse on the one leg in order to fill the tank. I know that this is not a good condition. I checked the resistance to the ground wire from the two hots and each were about 2.6Mohms. and the resistance between the leads is about 5.7 ohms which is a little over max (the pump manual says max is 5.2 ohms) but I took this reading at the house which is about 400' from the pump.
So the well driller wont answer his phone and someone says he takes off for Florida in the winter so I am left with the prospect of either hauling water or renting a boom truck and pulling the well pump myself. If I do the latter I really want to know what went wrong in the first place because the whole thing is kind of stressful, especially going into winter.
So here are a few questions for the group. First off is the float switch I was using is one of those with the metal ball inside a rubber float. I was just switching one leg off. Is this okay or should I use a contactor? Another question concerns letting a pump run free of any back pressure save the head pressure in the well. I read somewhere that a pump can draw too much amperage with low pressure such as my setup. This seems counter intuitive to me but perhaps the pump overspeeds without any pressure. Is this the case and could this have toasted my pump? The water level in the well when full is about 43 feet down.
The pump is a 1/2hp McDonald 2 wire. I have what is known as a "Pumptec" hooked to it to shut the pump down for a predetermined time if it runs dry. This and a disconnect with 8 amp fuses as recommended in the manual.
Sorry for the long windedness of this post but felt like giving as much details as I could may be of some help.
Thanks!
Dave
Haines, AK
This seemed to work like a dream for the first month or so and then yesterday a fuse blew in the disconnect switch. I replaced the fuse and put an amp probe on the 2 hots and sure enough one was drawing 6 amps and the other a whopping 17.5! The half horse pump still runs and pumps water but I have to keep a 20a fuse on the one leg in order to fill the tank. I know that this is not a good condition. I checked the resistance to the ground wire from the two hots and each were about 2.6Mohms. and the resistance between the leads is about 5.7 ohms which is a little over max (the pump manual says max is 5.2 ohms) but I took this reading at the house which is about 400' from the pump.
So the well driller wont answer his phone and someone says he takes off for Florida in the winter so I am left with the prospect of either hauling water or renting a boom truck and pulling the well pump myself. If I do the latter I really want to know what went wrong in the first place because the whole thing is kind of stressful, especially going into winter.
So here are a few questions for the group. First off is the float switch I was using is one of those with the metal ball inside a rubber float. I was just switching one leg off. Is this okay or should I use a contactor? Another question concerns letting a pump run free of any back pressure save the head pressure in the well. I read somewhere that a pump can draw too much amperage with low pressure such as my setup. This seems counter intuitive to me but perhaps the pump overspeeds without any pressure. Is this the case and could this have toasted my pump? The water level in the well when full is about 43 feet down.
The pump is a 1/2hp McDonald 2 wire. I have what is known as a "Pumptec" hooked to it to shut the pump down for a predetermined time if it runs dry. This and a disconnect with 8 amp fuses as recommended in the manual.
Sorry for the long windedness of this post but felt like giving as much details as I could may be of some help.
Thanks!
Dave
Haines, AK