Tom you are AWESOME and thank you!
Let me see if I can rearticulate all this back to you - since I'm not a plumber but an Internet engineer.
Initially he did not use the compressed air. Initially he did just what you said I think; ran the pump untill it reached cut out pressure, I watched him shut the house water off (turned the little red handle on the copper pipe), turned the electricity to the pump off at the pump breaker box, and watched the pressure gauge. I believe this is when he saw the needle go down to 32 lbs. I think I heard him say that the pressure was leaking and we weren't getting up to 50 on a 40-60 switch and that meant possibly a leak in the line or a problem at the well pump side. I saw him clamp a volt meter to the electrical breaker box at the base of the house water tank, turn the house water off and look at a voltage meter and he said he saw the pump was still pumping at 7 amps (?) and i read the breaker box sticker on cover which said 6.4 amps. He said the pump kept pumping because the pressure requirement was never being fulfilled so the pump thought it was supposed to continue pumping....either the pump was working as designed and there was a leak in the supply line, or the pump was pumping even though it shouldn't be.
He said perhaps this might be either be a leak in the supply line, or if we're lucky some loose bracket at pump well side or something else on pump end and we tried to eliminate the supply line as a problem. He used the compressed air as a final test and after the compressed air test he still said we're at 32-35 but not to even 40 lbs.
At this point he said we then needed to check the well side for a malfunction but we could not dig up well head because of 4 feet of snow and dark out, so I took the weekend to dig it up for him to access by today (Tuesday.)
> Has anybody thought to increase the pressure at the control box?
Actually the pressure in the house has always been just great. This was a change I noticed suddenly - within a day or two went from 'great' to 'something feels wrong with the pressure'. THANK YOU for the directions on how to increase the pressure though for future if I ever need.
Today we accessed the well head, lifted it, and he did some things with gauges that I couldn't see, and he said there did not seem to be a problem with the supply line from well to house which is good. But that since we still had a pressure problem perhaps the pump itself wasn't pumping at the rate it needed to. He left to investigate pump prices...3/4 hp 230 volt 5 gallon well pump.
oddly enough, after he left, i took a shower to cleanup after being in the dirt. the pressure seemed fine now. hmm. i went to the jazuzzi where i was always able to reproduce this problem...turn on water and wait 90-120 seconds and it goes from full flow to WHAM - trickle. Well - this time I turned on jacuzzi and it ran full flow for over 12 minutes when i stopped it. Turned on washing machine - no problem. Dishwasher - no problem. All sinks and flushed all toilets - no problem.
I'm wondering what the problem was - and if I still do have a problem. I will wait a few days to monitor this behavior before deciding our next move. Wondering if our troubleshooting on the well pump end might have dislodged something that had the pressure obstructed? (Our efforts included us lifting the 'screw pipe' (?) up and clamping it so it wouldn't fall back down into well - while he retrofitted some valve devices he used.
Everything seems fine now. Strange. Wonder if I have a problem that will resurface.
Thoughts Tom?
- kath
Linear Mode
