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New septic lift pump won t shut off
Yesterday the alarm went off telling us the septic tank level was too high. The pump was not running so I pulled the pump (a Meyers brand pump) and took it to the pump store who matched it up to a Little Giant pump. It fit fine and, when fired up, pumped like a champ.
Unfortunately it never shut off when the water level got low and had to be shut off when it started sucking air.
The tank has an external float assembly with two floats about 18" apart vertically. I have no wiring diagram that shows how pump cycling is supposed to be controlled.
Can anyone offer suggestions on why the pump may not be shutting off when the water level is low?
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New septic lift pump won t shut off
Hi Frank,
Both the upper and lower float are hanging by their cords so when the water rises they should float up to the horizontal position and drop to vertical as the level falls. So they are both in the "low water" position now. Moving the floats up and down didn't shut off the pump. I think the upper float controls only the in-house high water alarm (that works) but I'm not sure how the lower float is supposed to work. Are they generally wired in series with the pump? Do they go bad? I expect they have a mercury type switch in them which shouldn't generally go bad, but ???
I also am suspicious whenever two things fail at the same time. The old pump was definitely bad, maybe a failing float switch caused it to burn out.
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New septic lift pump won t shut off
Greg, yes, I just bought a new pump and installed it in place of the old one. The floats were never touched. Tomorrow I'll go out and put a meter across the float inputs and make some measurements to see if it works. It appears that the float switches full voltage, can that be right? I'll just disconnect it and do a continuity test with wires disconnected while moving it up and down.
Frank, there is a pole in the tank that has two hooks that are adjustable for height. They each have a float that pretty much just hangs over the hook. I haven't been close enough to see just how they are attached but that's pretty much it.
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New septic lift pump won t shut off
Thanks, JD, that's sort of the conclusion I had come to. The splices were made just as they originally were unless I screwed it up. I cut the old wires and pigtailed the new in the same locations but there was some question as to the color coding. The old pump was hardwired with black (hot), white (neutral) and green ground. The new pump had green, blue and brown. When I cut the plug off I tested the colors at the plug and concluded that blue was hot (the wide spade on the three prong plug).
Is the float switch supposed to switch hot or ground?
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New septic lift pump won t shut off
Thanks fellas, I'll give it another go tomorrow. I think blue was wired as hot and will check tomorrow. An online reference said that the wide terminal was hot but you can't always believe what's online. That probably won't fix the problem but you have supplied lots of good information to check out. The new pump is a "Little Giant" brand, didn't know that was European.
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New septic lift pump won t shut off
Well, no luck. The hot and neutral were backwards but it didn't fix it. The bottom float always reads closed. That probably caused the last pump to burn out but it was 11 years old.
I'll have somebody out next week to fix it since I don't want to burn any more time off messing around with it in the cold and rain. Let somebody who has parts on their truck fix it.
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New septic lift pump won t shut off
A Russian friend from work told me the easy way to remember European color coding. Brown (hot) is the color of your pants if you touch it.
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New septic lift pump won t shut off
Well the guy came out and replaced the float. $445 for an hours work. Seems like a rip but at least it's done. He said the old pump had puked it's guts out and dumped oil in the tank. Figures.
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