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Well and water system

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Wolvenar:
 With all the talk about how hard pumping water offgrid is, I have been feeling particularly lucky to live where I do,
 it makes getting water easy.

As of 5/6/2012 this well has run on our offgrid system for 3 days, in poor solar conditions.
So far so good, but there has not been a lot of water demand either.

We have a standard Jetpump system with 2 inch stainless steel screen point.
Drinkable ( very good) water is only 28 feet down here, so pumping is very easy.
Water flow only depends on the size of pipe and pump your willing to put in.

When I repaired our water system years back I had to re-drive a point, well at least thats what I thought.
When my friend and I tried to drive (with an automated driver) a point in this white sugar sand it went about 8 feet and was stopped in its tracks, not by rocks, but the sand compacts instead of getting out of the road. I remembered then my grandpa used to go on about the troubles he had getting to water here. He said he had to auger down to the water before he could drive the point in.
So this is what I wound up doing (by hand).
The sad part is I had a 6 inch augered hole right to the water, yet because of finances we only put in a 2 inch point   :(

 My mother lives on the other side of our property now so we added a line to her instead of adding a new well.
So this little pump is easily supplying 2 homes.

Specs:
110v
~900w while on
28 feet to water from ground level
42 feet to bottom of point ( but not bottom of that water table)
~9 gpm max flow

 
Well pit ( grandfathered in no longer legal in Mn)


Many layers of insulation ( Minnesota ya know)


The open pit. the block walls were built in the 50's by my grandpa.
However this well spot has been here since well before the turn of the century. It was a open pit (wishing well) style well then
a point was put in and the majority of the hole filled with sand.
Yeah I know kinda messy piping, but I did what I had to work with back then


Close up, this pressure switch is just in case the one in the house fails and pressure gets to high.
Amazingly this pump can push well over 100psi.



Pic of the manifolds in the unfinished utility room

ChrisOlson:
I've never considered pumping water that big of a deal for off-grid.  It's an intermittent load.  Our 240 volt Red Jacket 1.5 hp submersible pump is 165 feet down.  It only draws 7 amps.  You can run it with even a small 120 volt inverter with an autotransformer on it.
--
Chris

rossw:

--- Quote from: ChrisOlson on May 06, 2012, 07:06:16 pm ---I've never considered pumping water that big of a deal for off-grid.  It's an intermittent load.  Our 240 volt Red Jacket 1.5 hp submersible pump is 165 feet down.  It only draws 7 amps.  You can run it with even a small 120 volt inverter with an autotransformer on it.

--- End quote ---

Not dissimilar to my situation, Chris.

I don't have a well... but I do live on (in) the very top of a hill.
We have a 105,000 litre tank right by the house, and another the same size further down the hill where it can (just) get "town water". I have a bore pump (designed for a 4" casing) in the bottom tank. It takes about 800 watts from my 240V AC supply. It pushes water 150' vertically and 400' horizontally up the hill to fill my "house" tank.

The old shurflow DC pump was a total waste of time and money.

Because we have so much water in the top tank, we can comfortably operate for 3-4 months without needing to run the pump - so it only operates when (a) the top tank is less than 75% full and (b) we have surplus power and (c) the system expects to have surplus power for at least 2 hours and (d) nothing else wants the power more!

This is a semi-automated system, and I'm working towards making it fully automatic with "best guessing".

ChrisOlson:
Ross, some friends of ours that live off-grid about 30 miles north of us also have a cistern.  They fill it with the generator and a 240 volt deep well submersible pump.  Then feed the house with a DC ShurFlo pump.  It works great for them.

If you have heavy loads on your system, and not enough reserve capacity to handle the well pump if it starts, then it can be a challenge with a water and well system like ours.  That's why I used to have a separate inverter to run the well pump when we had our 12 volt system.  But since we've gone with the new 24 volt system it handles it with ease, and if the load exceeds what the inverters can do continuously they bring the genset online to help out until the load goes away.

I think it all depends on what sort of equipment you have because for very small off-grid systems a well pump can be a major load.  But if that's the case, the extra inverter just to run the pump always worked well for us too.
--
Chris

A of J:
Wolv, while clearly your system works, I question how well.

Depending on your elevation above sea level, 28' is within reach of a centrifugal pump, a jet pump uses 25% of the consumed energy in re-circulating water down to the jet.

From your explanation you have saturated sands that yield adequate water that is not in a pressure layer, the universal problem with a "point", spear in my language (same beast) is the surrounding mesh can block, requiring pulling up and cleaning. With that you still need a foot valve that is below water level, a very problematic situation.

A professional driller (in my past life I used to be one) with a mud rotary rig would establish a water well in about 1 hour, you can DIY if that is your desire.

Allan
   

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