Logged in users > User Diaries
Haven't been around much lately
jenkinswt:
Nice water tower Frank. I keep talking about doing something like this mainly to help with battery power with the well pump kicking in at night, etc. We have a well about 50' and I'd love to pump it up during sunny weather to use later. We used to have a 50 gallon water drum at our last house in the second story but the water pressure was really low. I'd like to get one up 20' or more above our first floor which would take a sturdy tower and it needs to be kept above freezing also. I like how you've got yours built and covered like a building. If I insulated something like that I can put a little heat into it from our wood boiler.
Sorry to hear about your fall! Sounds like you've more than recovered and getting some projects done.
Frank S:
Yeah I' can almost safely say that I have recovered . However you never completely get over these things. unless they cut out the bad and replace but then you have to take those pharma concoctions for the rest of your life. I have to take a couple of pills once a day for at least a full year some docs have said 6 months, but will do the year to appease the cardio folks. Why my arteries were 95% blocked was and so far as I know is still a mystery to them since there was no plaque or hardening or fatty deposits No determinable proof that life style has contributed. They don't like that my heart rate never elevates above 60 no matter how strenuous they try to do a stress test but my BP always remains in the 130 over 55 range Which doesn't mean beans to me because I've never monitored it.
I do have 1 more minor artery with a 45% reduction, not enough to be concerned with he said.
In constructing a water tower the most important thing to remember is 8.345 lbs per gallon
the way I have braced my tower and the footing it stands on will easily support a much larger storage tank than I would ever want to place on top of it.
Our water tower we had when I was a kid was made out of redwood & Cyprus it was an 8 ft diameter 10 ft tall tank resting on top of a tower made of 6 15 ft long 6x6 timbers braced with rods and turnbuckles built in 1906 still holds water today or it did the last time I saw it about 4 years ago.
My well is also around 60 feet It is sanded in really bad so I need to either pump about a 1000 gallons of water down it at a high rate of flow by dropping a 2" poly pipe to the bottom and pumping the water down with a 2 or 3 inch gasoline powered pump or blow it with 300 CFM air pressure. I have both the pump and the air compressor so could do either of both. Which according to the well driller who says he has done it to this well many years ago when it got to the point of only producing 1GPM. He told me that I should be able to expect it to produce 20 GPM for about 10 years again. This will probably be this winter's project. then I plan on not having a pressure tank on it but constructing another tower at the well. The well is 450 feet from my current tower.the ground level is also about 15 feet lower than the ground level where my tower now sits.
I haven't decided which way I want to go with this.
Do I want to build a 35 ft tall tower and place a 100 gallon tank on top of it. install a pump at the well to fill the tank on solar & batteries or run it on the already available 220 line currently there. or leave the 80 gallon pressure tank in the pump house with a bottom hole pressure pump. There was a huge pile of burned out pumps on the property so the previous owners had to replace their pump several times over the years due to the sand.
I would like to limit the well to around 40 gallons per hour with an on time of not more than 10 minutes at a time By doing this and having a 100 gallon storage at the well I can run the water slowly through the 300 lb filters may even put 1 at the well for the water to pass through before it goes into the storage tank. but if I did that then the pump would have to be capable of the higher restriction of passing through the filter.
Doable since the added restriction would be similar to that of a 250 or 300 ft deep well whether it is to a pressure tank or to a tower above if to a tower then I could actually gravity feed to the house tower.
BY the way this is what I insulated the tower with.
jenkinswt:
I might have to do something like that to our well at some point. A few months back I thought our pump was going bad, it was running non stop and not hardly kicking off. It was really killing the batteries. I finally pulled the pump and found it had been sitting in mud. I cut 5' of pipe off and stuck it back in hoping this would help. I gave it a day and no change so I ordered a new pump. The day before the new pump came the old one cleared itself of the mud and has been working perfectly since! Oh well I have a spare now I guess. I haven't calculated the gpm of our well but I do have to be careful when filling something large or it will run dry but refills quickly. My parents well is 25 or 30' but a bit larger diameter and they can't pump it dry but their water is harder.
Most of the time the pump and pressure tank works so good I forget all about wanting a water tower but if we get a long stretch and power is low I start looking options that don't involve bigger battery banks. At our last house I had a well about the same distance but it had been abandoned for many years and I know animals, etc. have gotten into it over the years. It was a real nice hand dug well very deep. I decided to hand dig a well next our house thinking I'd surely hit water at 20' like most wells in the area. I dug a 4' round hole and braced it as I went down. I went 22' but was hitting so much stone I was about to call it quits so I modified some tools and dug out a smaller hole from there that went down to I think 33 or 34' and hit steady water. I foolishly installed a 4" pvc pipe in that hole and put a submersible pump in. There was only .25 gpm of water with a 4" hole at that depth! Before we moved I was going to put a smaller pump in and let it trickle up to a holding tank or make a new well. .25 gpm is 360 gallons a day if it could be pumped all the time. I was pretty happy to find our current well when we moved here after doing all that work. I don't consider all that work wasted as I learned a lot from it but I doubt I'd ever do it again.
Frank S:
There is a few in this part of the country who will use a regular submersible 1/2 hp to 3/4 HP 120 or 240v pump on their wells but choke them down to 1 or 2 GPM by adding a valve to the pressure side before their pressure tank and install a run/off timer between the pump and the pressure switch. that way they say their wells can pump for a minute or 2 then be off for a while to allow the well to refill.
Some say they get good results but to me it sounds like a recipe for a lot of burned out pumps.
Hopefully some of the older forum members have been following this thread and can add their knowledge.
OR maybe a fresh thread in the water forum should be started. as there doesn't seem to be a lot of traffic on these forums lately.
tanner0441:
Hi Frank good to see you on here again.
A tank 30ft in the air will give 1 Att of pressure, give or take a bit for ASL and barometric pressure. Mains pressure in the UK is 60 psi which is 4 Ats roughly.
We had this demonstrated at school (long time ago) we put a tank on the ground with a pipe in it, then ran the pipe up the side of the building and in through a window on the top floor. The pipe had been marked every foot, then we pulled a vacuum on it with a Tor pump. No amount of pumping would raise the column of water higher than 30ft.
Brian
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version