Hello everyone,

First some background. I bought a foreclosed property. The plan is for my folks to retire there rather then convert my basement into an apartment.The bank sold it as vacant land. It has several structures and old trailer house on it and a well. The previous owner passed away. His kids lived there until the county sheriff's department evicted them. They trashed the trailer and the property: So far removed 5- 30 yard dumpsters of trash and replaced all the plumbing in the trailer (concrete and nails down the drains).

The well pump died on Friday, and after much dithering decided instead of trying to fit a new submerged pump into a very, very jury rigged system (storage tank is a pressure tank from an army shower unit that looks like it rolled down a mountain) to just start over.

So what we know about the well is rumors from folks who knew the old man. The well is between 250-350 ft, the pump is at 200, 225, or 300 depending on who remembers him putting it in, and he did it himself. I know it is over 140 feet because that is how much PVC we've pulled up before the lighting & rain put a stop to work. Hope to get the old pump out today.

No idea how much water it actually puts out. Know that it has been supplying the trailer, out buildings... with water since the 1980's. The water pressure is crappy, except for the tub and forget running water in two places at once.

Now this is where the fun starts. The well is nowhere near the trailer. In fact the well and tank is about 200 feet as the crow flies from the trailer and ~100 feet lower in elevation.

Okay so I put in a new pump on flexible-poly line (pulling PVC is pissing me off) w/ a safety line.

So after that do I put a storage tank by the well and put in a sending pump to run water up hill from the tank to the trailer and everything else? Or a pressure tank and hope like heck that the pressure tank can send water that far?

Thank you for thoughts, ideas and help. I love diagrams-very visual person

 

I think you'll wind up having a pressure tank and switch located right inside the building, like a conventional system; with power being sent down the well to the submersible pump. Being 200-300 lateral feet away from the dwelling isn't unusual; not much different from just being 300' deeper. Then, provided there's water in the well, supplying water to multiple appliances simultaneously is a non-issue.

My real reason for chiming in here is to question what this place has for a waste water disposal system. With the well being located 100' below the elevation of the dwelling, I'm wondering what you've got there for a septic system/cess pool/leach field, and where it is relative to the well site ?

 

Hi Vermont,

Yup there is water in the well. We've been getting soaking rains for the last two weeks, and hopefully it has helped the water table, and that there will be fewer drought killed trees. The remaining shreds of hurricanes.

None of the local rumors about the place indicate that the well has ever gone dry, but some folks in the area that have 100ft or less wells had problems last summer.

The trailer and shop are on the point of the ridge, the well is down-slope to the west, the septic is off the point to the south. I am actually surprised that the waste system isn't a 67 Chevy with a pipe in the window.

And a question/comment bounced back at you. I have never lived in a conventional location. The house I grew up in didn't have a tank in the system and my house is gravity feed, so I have water pressure from the tank even when the power/well aren't on.

At this point I have no plans to put a tank up top at the buildings, so I am assuming you mean the tank and switch in the pump house at the well site. Also if the lateral location adds 300 ft of depth to what already might be a 300ft well, Then I am looking at a pump that has a max pumping depth of 600 feet? The local shops don't carry anything beyond 300 feet, one will order anything I want if I bring in all the details.

 

No I didn't mean that the 200 or 300 foot distance horizontally would create additional work for the pump (other than a little friction loss); just that you needn't have to deal with two tanks anymore than someone with a deeper well.

Why is there even a pump house ?

 

Almost all well water systems require either a gravity fed vented tank above the level of all fixtures or a sealed pressure tank. (The rare exceptions use special on-demand pumps that turn on only when water is being used. Standard well pumps don't last long if they have to turn on and off for short bursts.)

Is the tank properly pre-pressurized? The primary purpose of a pressure tank next to the pump or in the basement is to hold an air cushion to maintain the system pressure.

With the pump house and tank 100' below the house, the pressure must be a little higher than the pressure desired up at the house. A pump turn on pressure of 40 and a turn off pressure of 60 at the pump house would probably be appropriate. Better results are had if the pressure tank or a pressure tank is close to but not after the fixtures being served.

If you add a sending pump, you need another pressure tank after it.

Additional pressure tanks do not cause problems. All need to be pre-pressurized otherwise water will not go in and out of them. The maximum water storage ability is achieved when the air pressure in the tank is a few PSI less than the pump turn on pressure and when the tank has no water in it. Under normal operation, water enters and leaves the tank using about a third to a half of the tank volume. The most modern systems, after pre-pressurizing and when working normally, do not need to have air added or bled off.

Other permutations are possible, for example the well pump could feed a gravity subsystem as stage one with a storage tank slightly higher than the sending pump next to it. That sending pump is the start of stage two that covers all the fixtures in the house. It's treated as the one and only fixture fed by the stage one storage tank. Stage two could be either a pressurized or gravity subsystem regardless of what stage one is.

 

Morning Allan J,

Thank you. A lot of that was helpful.

I left out a bunch of detail about the existing system because the only thing being reused is the well. The tank is not "in-line" with the pump, it is "Tee'd" of to the side, it may have been a pressure pump at one time but not now, it is a water storage tank that gravity feeds the corral, run-in-shed and old garden down-slope.

I think you answered my main question, since I've never lived anywhere with a pressure tank and only know one person who has one (in the basement). I was working under the assumption that the pressure tank would not be able to push the water all the way up hill to the trailer & shop, and that is why I would need a sending pump.

 

A pressure tank works just as well with one bottom opening teed to the main line pipe compared with two openings, one for the main line in and the other for the main line out. Actually all modern pressure tanks have just one opening for the connection to the water system (and a smaller opening with a tire type valve up top for setting the air pressure).

A gravity tank requires a top vent or at least a small amount of air pressure. If you waited for a sealed tank to fill up and then bled out as much air as you could from a top valve then most of the water will not come out of the tank. The condition with a sealed tank (all if more than one) nearly full of water will cause the pump to go on and off frequently and shorten its life. That condition will also result in erratic water pressure and flow.