Our water went out completely last Thursday. We went out to the pump and looked around to see if we could find any issues. We found oil under one of the capacitors, so my husband bought a two new ones on Friday. (He couldn't read the MFD's on the old one, so he had to take a guess.) He put both of them in, and they both blew right away. So, he ran to town and got a new control box (1HP, 230v). When he got it set up, the only wire not registering ohms was the black, so we figured out we'd have to pull the pump.

We pulled the pump on Saturday and figured out that it was a 3/4hp pump. (We just bought the house a year ago and had no idea until we pulled it.) It was obviously in rough shape and the wiring looked pretty scary, so we replaced the pump, pipe and wiring in our 100+' deep well. We bought a 1hp pump since our control box is 1hp. We got 100 black poly since they didn't have the kind of PVC they said was "the best" for wells.

Anyways, we got the new pump in the well and we now have water. However, no matter how much fiddling my husband does with the pressure, we're still having intermittent issues. We'll be running water and all of a sudden, the water will cut off for about 1-2 seconds, after waning for about a half to one second, and then come back with no problems. We've figured out that this is happening when the pump is kicking on. It doesn't happen a lot - for example, it only happened once while filling up an entire tub full of bath water. However, we're afraid that it could indicate some more serious issues. The pressure tank stays around 60 psi, except for when we lose pressure when it goes to 0.

 

What is the cut in and cut out pressure on the pump switch?
Did you check the air pressure on your tank when you put the new pump in?
The tank air cushion should be set 2-3 psi below the cut in. If it's set to high, you will get the 1 second delay as the tank will completely empty before the pump kicks in.

 

My husband said it's about 85 to 65 on cut in/cut out.
Air pressure when we put in the new pump was 60 psi.

Sounds like we probably need to drain some air from the tank. Will try that tonight, thank you!

 

"about 85 to 65" is not going to work. You need a pressure gauge plumbed into the water system to know what the cut in pressure is. Then once you know (not guess) the pump's cut in (turn on) pressure then the air in the pressure tank should be set 2-3 psi less than the cut in pressure. The pressure in the tank can only be checked with the well pump is turned off and all pressure bled from the system (open a faucet and only check the air pressure after no water flows).

Also, those pressures sound high. Most are set for 40/60 or 50/70 psi.

 

We do have a pressure gauge plumbed to our water system, which is what we've been going by. We'll need to bleed the system tonight. We didn't do that, and the pressures we were getting were 65/85. Thanks for the info. Hopefully we'll get a little more normal pressure reading after we do this.

 

Okay, we bled the system last night. The pressure spout on top of the well registered 40, but our pressure gauge plumbed to the pipe registered 20. Is it supposed to register 0 psi when drained? And aren't those numbers supposed to match?

 

We have a sticky here that describes how to set up a tank properly. http://www.doityourself.com/forum/we...ml#post1453545

There may be something wrong with the pressure gauge. They cost ~$5 at the hardware store.

 

hi cmonkey -

I had a gauge that would never drop below 40 because it was broken, but it would go above 40. Led me astray until I figured out it was broken. As recommended I would buy 2 new gauges before I did any more troubleshooting. If you in fact had drained all the water out of the tank, then I think 40 and 20 are BOTH wrong. I think they should read zero!

As stated below, a high of 85 does not seem correct. I believe most installations are 40-60 at the most and the tank AIR pressure, when ALL the water is drained, should be 2 psi below the cut-in. So for a 40-60 setup the air pressure in the tank should be set at 38 psi.

What I do is drain all the water from the tank, make sure the pressure gauge reads zero, then set the tank air pressure to 38 psi because my setup is 40-60. I believe that’s the standard procedure.