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deep well jet pumps
I am having that problem with nearly everything around here, also 25-30 years old. Doorknobs, faucets, shower valves and track lighting. Good thing the cars are new and our personal parts are holding up.
Tom, ain't it amazing what people try to "save" money on? Kind of like rebuilding an engine and using the old gaskets?
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deep well jet pumps
Mark has my sympathy. Our house is 45 years old and it is a full time job repairing, rebuilding and replacing things, especially toilets. They haven't been manufactured for 40 years and finding spares is getting tougher and tougher. Thank goodness for the Internet but it all detracts from tractor time. I've been looking for a water leak for the past 3 months and haven't found it yet. Just about to the point of trenching and laying a new one but I'd have to cut across sprinkler lines to do it. I'll keep looking for a little while longer unless someone out there has a bright idea on how to find it. Tell me, why do they bury wellheads 5' deep where you are? Is it because of the weather? Here in east Texas the wellhead and tanks are always right on surface, usually protected by a wellhouse of some kind with a light or small plug in heater to prevent freezing during the winter.
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deep well jet pumps
Water leaks can be a problem. Doing things the cheap way can be costly.
The guy a few doors up has and old house. He had a large water bill for the size of the house when he bought it, but as he had nothing to compare it too, he never realized it. One month he got a bill for 300$. As water is not expensive here, this means he had used enough water to fill my 40,000 gallon pool 5 times.
He could not imagine where the water had gone. After a couple of days of checking he realized that they had connected up the city water without stubbing of the old well. The valve had rusted through after leaking for a number of years and poured the water down the well.
Thousands of dollars lost for a 8$ valve or a 50 cent cap.
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deep well jet pumps
My neighbour surprised me and went for a professionally installed submersible. Now all we have to do is fill the pit and holes. They must have gotten tired of used gaskets.
An extension casing will be welded on to bring it above ground and I believe a pitless adapter installed. I'm not 100% on exactly what a pitless adapter is but I believe it takes the feed line out the side of the casing below ground rather than over the top and back down below frost. Yes, frost is the reason why well heads and feed lines are buried here. Four-foot is fairly safe but 5' starts getting a bit excessive. Surface pumps and pressure tanks have to be kept warm, but basements around here are heated of frost heave cracks foundations. There are a few pumps and tanks that are in small insulated spaces and use the light-bulb trick. I'd use baseboard heaters myself because they don't burn out.
If there's little snow cover early in a winter, there's a run on straw bales. People stack them on top of septic tanks and leech fields to keep them from freezing. If one freezes up, you're sort of done till spring. Steam can be used to thaw out a tank but it tends to just freeze up again. Freezing's a problem because tanks and fields can't be installed very deep or they don't work.
I think pros look for leaks using air pressure. Feed lines are disconnected at the pressure tanks and at well heads to see which segment looses pressure. My father-in-law found a leak at his cottage in an elbow at the top of a dug well. He swears that lines and fittings of the same size must be different. Well, it's fixed anyway. If I dug up a feed line I’d relay it in drainpipe so it could be changed in the future without digging up the whole trench. Got to be careful that the drainpipe can’t channel water back toward the house though.
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Peters,
That may be why the neighbor down the street with the well had such a great water supply that quarter? I have the same setup, town water with a split system using one well for drinking and the other seperated from the town system with a valve (it used to do the same job as the town water now does, toilets, washer and such). As soon as I have the line installed to the barn, I am moving the tank there and capping the line to the house. I don't know why I keep using the well other than the water tastes a whole lot better than the municipal brand. I had thought of the bad valve scenerio when I made the change over but figured it would be done long before the valve gives way and besides, it gives me a backup if I need one. My wife thinks I am excessive-compulsive, back up water, back up electric, back up snow plow, back up back up. Ohhhh..country living. I have been extremely pleased with the performance of these deep well submersable pumps. One of my previous homes has a jet pump and it caused me constant headaches. My wells are both around 130' deep and in fact, one pump then pushes up a hill 200' to the house without a problem! I know how your neighbor feels Tom, nothing worse than no water.
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A couple stories about disappearing water: We figure that we had to demolish the house at our camp because a previous owner did install the well feed inside clay tile. The feed cut into a dug well tile about 4' down, and the well didn't have a tile raised above ground. Spring runoff filled up the well and water ran down the clay tile into his cellar. That combined with moisture from a high water table that was almost at the cellar floor anyway rotted the house from the bottom. It was built before vapour barrier.
I visited a school chum who took a job in Pittsburgh once. We went to a party at his boss's new house in the burbs. The builder had done some remedial work on the new house already. According to the story, the boss looked out a window one morning and there was no water in the swimming pool. 'Yikes I must be going nuts.'
The builder had built near an old uncharted coal mine shaft. The earth settled, cracking the liner and water ran down the old mine shaft. Further inspection revealed that the house foundation also was in trouble. Apparently that sort of thing is a problem in Pittsburgh because there are many mineshafts that nobody knows about. Builders are responsible for site surveys and have to correct any resulting problems.
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Getting in a little late on this one...
My old jet pump let go last February - while I was nicely lathered up in the shower. I towelled off as best I could and headed out to the pump store. Bought a 3/4 hp Burk. I noticed when I was removing the old one that there was this weird looking piece on the end of the pipe right before the pump. It was kind of bulb-shaped and it said Jacuzzi on it. Anyways, it was old and corroded so I didn't bother putting it back. I guess some of you realize that this thing was a check valve. When foot valves go, you can temporarily get around the problem by putting a check valve in at the pump end to keep the water from leaking down out of the pipe. I went back to the pump store and bought one of those too.
I can identify with those who own older homes - ours was built in 1890. In the five years I've been here, I've already delt with my fair share of headaches.
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Jacuzzi seems to get around wells a lot. I think the relay box for my submersible pump says 'Jacuzzi' on it.
I still don't know a whole bunch about jet pumps but I'd think that something on the end of the pump is a venturi. A venturi (my spell checker changed it to a city in CA my first post) is on a jet pump for shallow wells and down the well for deeper pumping. If I've got it right, the venturi is what distinguishes a jet pump from an ordinary suction pump. The foot valve certainly was the main problem. It was stuck open, and not just leaking. From the looks of things, it was a race between the foot valve and the venturi to see which was would shut off the water first.
My neighbour surprised me and went for a pitless adapter and conversion to a submersible. That would have been my choice as well, but I probably would have used the main well drilling company in the area. Of course, they're probably not too available right now. A crew is a few hundred yards down the highway in the other direction. They drilled a 400'+ hole and then used some dynamite. The blast shifted a rock and trapped their $4000 rotary bit in the hole and now they're trying to salvage the hole and get their bit back.
The job probably would have been more organized if the well company had done it. As it was, I was greeted mid-morning yesterday with a request for my backhoe. The welder who came to extend the casing above ground says the hole was too small to weld in I did wonder about that on Friday, but oh well, it's somebody else's job and I'm just helping out. They also made about four trips back to town but managed to get the water on around 7:00 last night. Now I have to fill in the hole this morning before going to town. Somebody else's job has been quite a of work for me but that's just living in the country.
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I think I have a submersible pump in my well. No one can tell me for sure as the hole is almost three hundred feet deep and the pump has been down that hole for thirty years. Maybe it is time to plan a replacement before my shower becomes a dry cleaning operation too.
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deep well jet pumps
If the pump isn't in the basement then it's almost certainly a submersible. The water table might be low enough that a jet pump wouldn't work very efficiently and a submersible is about the only alternative. I suppose it’s possible to put a jet pump inside a casing above the high water table but I haven’t heard of it.
I heard somewhere that good quality submersibles tend to be reliable to at least 25 years. I'm not sure how old ours is either but I've also been thinking of replacing it on general principal. Well, I guess I don't know how old the water heater is either so maybe I'll just get carried away. Canadians and beaver share a common characteristic of being obsessed with water management.
At least to replace our pump, the casing is already above ground so I don't have to find the well head and dig a sizable hole like at my neighbour's. It's a little hard to dig holes around here if a pump fails during the winter. For do it yourself replacement ideas. It's good to know that 800' of feed line filled with water and the pump gets pretty heavy. Sometimes you hear of people pulling their pumps by running the line over large diameter wheels and pulling with a tractor idling away in low gear. There are probably other 'how to's' that I don't know about.
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07-26-2002, 08:24 
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