I am having a problem with my water pressure. I have a well. When I turn the shower on, the water pressure is fine for about 4 minutes, then it goes down to nothing. I watched the pressure gauge on the tank and here is what I saw:

When the pressure was good, the pressure on the tank was between 40 and 42 lbs.
The pressure would slowly creep down to 38lbs.
As soon as it hit 38, it would immediately drop down 18 lbs and stay there until the water was shut off.
As soon as the shower was shut off, the pressure immediately jumped up to 40.

Any ideas what would cause this type of fluctuation?

Reset the pressure in your bladder tank. To do this you will need to:

1. Determine at what pressure the pump comes on. I'm going to bet it's 38#, but simply do what you did before. Watch the gauge and see where it is when the switch "clicks" to turn on the pump.

2. Whatever the cut in pressure is, the pressure at the top of the tank needs to be set to 2# BELOW that. So, if its 38#, then you will set the tank pressure to 36#.

3. To do that, turn off the system and drain the tank pressure by opening a lower level faucet and running water until the pressure gauge reads zero. Then use an air tank and tire gauge to adjust the pressure in the tank.

4. Turn the system back on and check your problem again.

The switch turned on t 46. I filled the bladder up to 44. Same results... any other ideas?

If the pump is cutting on at 46, and the pressure is still falling to 38 and ultimately to less than 20, then it would seem you have a problem with the pump volume. How long does it take it to recover to cut off pressure after, for instance, the shower is turned off and the system is down to 20#?

It immediately rises back up to 40 and rises up to the max of 60 quickly. This all occurs within a few minutes.

Do this Mike. Turn on an outside faucet and let it run until the pump cuts on. Then, run it into a 5 gallon bucket and time how long it takes to fill the bucket. It should be able to do that in something under a minute. Let's do that to check your pump volume. Do it two or three times to get an average.

Not to slice this too thin, but there is a difference between "immediately" and "a few minutes". I am really interested in the time it takes to get from sub-20 back to 40. Are we talking two or three seconds... half a minute... full minute?

I hope someone can answer this for me. I have this problem too. It takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes for the water to come back on. When I checked the pressure when off this morning it was around 10 psi. Right after I checked the pressure in the tank the pressure shot right up to 60 PSI and my water turned back on.

Last night I changed the pressure switch. The guy from Lowe's did not include the tube that connected it to the water pipe to the switch so I had to take apart the old switch and new switch and use those pieces. I am going back to Lowe's tonight to get that piece and put the switch back to "brand new" but I am guessing that will not have an effect on the pressure.

Please help!