well project

[forgeblast]

I am working on a little project at home to see where in case of an emergency we are in trouble.
we have two wood stoves, we have a propane cook stove so we are pretty good there for heat and for cooking.
where we are in trouble is our well.
its run by an electric pump. My question is can i make a pump that will allow me to pressurize my well from inside my house with out running more pipes. I found this picture (see attached llink) of a well schematic, but i am not too sure if its actually what im looking for.
I know its a little confusing, but im confused and that seems to go hand in hand. /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif
thanks for your help
forgeblast
http://www.survivalunlimited.com/deepwellpump.htm
Look at the house pressure diagram.

 

[Farwell]

I can't answer your question but I can offer a suggestion because I am in pretty much the same situation that you are in. If I was to purchase the pump system on the site you posted as well as the stoves you mentioned, I would be many dollars ahead if I purchased a whole house generator and transfer switch to supply my electrical needs in case of an emergency. My insurance company will not allow me to have a wood stove in any of the buildings on my property and I already have natural gas heat.
For approximately $3000 I can have a 15,000 watt natural gas or propane generator purchased, wired and installed.
My well is 121 feet deep and my water level is approximately 15 feet below the cap on my 5 inch well. In a true water emergency I could drop a 20 foot piece of 1 inch pvc pipe with a check valve on the base and use a standard hand pump to draw water.
When I had my well installed the installer told me that there is a way to hand pressurize your existing well pipe and use your existing system but I do not know the details.
I am going to watch this thread and maybe pick up a few pointers when someone else posts a reply.
Good luck and Happy New Year.
Farwell

 

[Highbeam]

What do you need the water for? Do you need it to drink or do you need it to take a shower? Your standard submersible well pump is a 220 volt pump of 1/2 HP or maybe 3/4 HP. A HP is only 750 watts.

If you were wanting to run the pump during a power outage. Get a generator, maybe fueled by your propane tank. If you don't want a generator, you can switch the 220 volt pump for a 110 volt pump and use an inverter to supply 110 volt AC power from a battery, even your car battery since 750 watts isn't horribly much. RV people use inverters all the time to make AC power out of DC batteries.

If you just want to drink to survive. Then store water. Note that your 50-80 gallon hot water heater and the 50-80 gallon expansion tanks will be full of water to be consumed if you need it. No pressure though.

Myself, I would just get a generator since you probably want your refirgerator to keep working too.

 

[Egon]

Both systems will work but the major drawback is maintaining houshold working pressure.

Using the hand pumps will certainly develop new muscles to bring everything up to pressure. These type of pumps have been in use for many a year. They commonly pumped to a bucket placed under the spout or into an atmospheric open tank. The tubing had a small hole below frost line that prevented freezeup by allowing water to drain out.

No experience with the solar type but again think it would work much better pumping into an open tank.

As others have stated a generator may be an easier way to go but would be required to run constantly to maintain your normal house system presure.

If you are really serious, outages are common and prolonged do some more investigating on the solar system pumping into a tank placed high in the house and utilize this hieght for a gravity fed house system. With a little thought and some manual valve switching this type of system could be tied to the downhole tubing of your submerssible well system and utilize your present household plumbing system.

I can rember the house water being supplied by a well and hand pump in the front porch. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Egon /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[sandman2234]

First question would be, how far is the well from the house? Is it a shallow well or deep well (and how far is the water from the top of the well casing?)
The best way for you to go is a generator, second is an inverter. A third way is to purchase a pump for your tractor PTO, and use a rubber hose to quick connect it. That way isn't real good if your water table is over 26-28' below the top of the well casing.
Water storage has it's drawbacks. Green slimey stuff tends to build up over time, unless you treat it with somethng (and who wants to drink additives!)
Solar is probably a lot more trouble, due to having to maintain the battery bank, and kind of expensive to set up.
Most people tend to go the generator route.
Truck drivers are another major user of 12v to 110v inverters. I got my 2000 watt inverter/30 amp battery charger when Exide made them. Cost at that time was over $600, but lighter duty ones can be purchased at Truckstops all over this country. Probably find them on ebay or online also. A 3000 watt light duty one can probably be bought for a lot less than I paid for mine.
David from jax

 

[turnkey4099]

I just read the promotional page. My take: I would want the company salesman to demonstrate it before I bought. They make reasonable claims and I can see nothing that wouldn't work. What isn't mentioned is the labor required to operate it. Lifint a colume of water say 60 ft is going to require a force of about 30 pounds. That is without pressurizing anything, just pumping into a bucket. To pressurize something to 100 psi as they claim? No way. I have put my time in on manual tire pumps and it is very hard to pressurize a tire to 30 pounds. Granted there is a mechanical advantage builtin into the lever but mechanical advantage is at the cost of productive work (water in bucket). So you pump easier but longer - takes the same amount of horsepower per gallon pumped. I seriously doubt that anyone including weight lifters would be able to pressurize a house pressure tank for one filling at one setting.

Harry K

 

[forgeblast]

Im glad you wrote about the labor required to pull water up that far, it was something i was not thing about. i wrote to the company and this is what they had to say.

"Yes, our deep well pumps have pipe and rod that goes down the well along side your existing pump.

The first thing that you need to do is check how deep the water is down in the well. Tie a metal washer (washer for a bolt) and drop it down the well and listen for it to hit the water. When it hits, you pull it up and measure the lenght of your string.

Then you need to put and extra 20-40 feet of drop pipe w/rod to allow for drought conditions.

You may want a solar well pump. It will presurize the system and the output if much higher. But, it costs more. But, if you have a deep water level, close to 200' then you may want to consider solar since the price is very close or even better.

The hand pump is good for drinking water, cooking, washing clothes, and things like that. It would take a lot of pumping to take baths every day.

You can presurize your pressure tank with our hand pump. We sell the pitless adapter kit that will do that for you. You would also put an outlet near the pump so you can get water at the pump too"

so reading between the lines, its going to be hard work to hand pressurize the system. i may look into putting a pump outside like my grandma had on her farm, that was a lot of fun when i was a kid. I guess i have to do my measuring first to see how far down the water is.
thanks all for posting
forgeblast

 

[erich]

Forgeblast

We live on a small mountain and have lost power for as much as five days. (The govenor sent the out of state electric crews home as soon as Boston had power!) We put in a deepwell hand pump along side our electric pump when the house was built. We got everything but the pipe from Lehman's in Kidron Ohio. Our plumber did the installation and was quite intrigued by our set up. My philosophy is to keep it simple so I opted to carry water by bucket rather than put in a second pitless adapter. If you expect a near end of the world catasrophe like Katrina, even a generator will have its limitations. They are noisy and hungry critters and if the outage is widespread how do you get your fuel? I figure we heat with wood and have a bake oven in the masonry heater so two of the necessities are covered. I also figured that since we are on a septic system, as long as we have water to flush the toilet the sewage problem is covered. ( I pity the city dwellers, look at the mess in the Superdome) Pumping the water is tedious but do-able, you'll be surprised how much less you'll use if you have to pump it. I spent two weeks in the northwoods at a camp with just a handpump. With the exception of washing clothes, I was able to live a fairly modern lifestyle waterwise. We heated five gallons of water by the stove when we took a sauna and then climbed a ladder and dumped the warm water into a tub with a spigot and a flower sprinkler head. You turned the water on briefly and got wet then shut the water off and lathered up then you turned the water back on and let it drain the tub while you rinsed off. We were working 12-14 hour days building a log building and after the sauna and shower I felt like a new man and slept like a log.

As far as washing clothes, I have an old wringer washer that I could put a gas engine on but that gets back to the fuel problem. If things got really bad I think you would have more to worry about than smelling bad and wearing dirty clothes.

Friends of ours lived off grid for years with a gravity water system. They would fire up a generator to pump water into a horse trough in the attic. It was fitted out with a float shut-off valve so they would not over fill it. From there it fed by gravity to the rest of the house.

Eric

 

[Farwell]

I may be wrong but I think that I read and article several years ago on the Internet about how much more efficient some of the modern hand pumps are and how they take a fraction of the energy that Grandma's hand pump did. The engineering that went into them amazed me. I think that the company that sold the pumps I am talking about was a Canadian company. I am not sure if this style pump was the type that did not draw water from the well but it pressurized the pipe so the water was pushed up a pipe rather than pulled like the older system.
You can still buy the old style hand pumps because I did that a couple of years ago and was shocked by the amount of horrible labor involved to pump 5 gallons of water from a 20 foot deep well. The pump was one of the smaller pumps like the ones that were mounted near the kitchen sink and pumped water from the cistern when I was a kid on the farm.
Farwell

 

[mrcaptainbob]

THis sounds handy to have if you're near a stream.....
http://virtual.clemson.edu/groups/irrig/Equip/ram.htm