Getting pipe and pump and wires into the well correctly is heavy work, and there are a couple of things you can do to make success more certain. The first has to do with the top of the well casing. If you’re dealing with a drilled well (and most submersible pumps go into drilled wells with metal casings), the edge of the casing is usually sharp because of the way casing is cut at the plant. That’s why it pays to spend a few minutes grinding off the sharp burr so it doesn’t damage your pipe. Given the weight involved, it’s easy for pipe damage to occur.
To help protect pipes when I do a submersible installation I made a plywood donut with a rounded inner edge that sits on top of the well. This eases pressure on the pipe because the pipe only touches rounded wood as it goes down, not a metal edge. Making a donut like this is easier than avoiding a kinked pipe without a donut.
Before you begin lowering the new installation into the well, put the tee handle on the pitless adaptor and tie the end of some 1/2” poly rope to the safety lug on the pump. Every submersible pump needs to be tied to the top of the well and not just hanging on its pipe and fittings. This relieves strain on the fitting while also ensuring you won’t lose the pump down the well if something goes wrong and breaks. Put two people in charge of feeding the pipe down into the well head, and a third guiding the top end of the pipe and tee handle along the ground.
After meshing the two halves of the pitless adaptor, tie the end of the safety rope on the top of the inner well cap, complete your connections to the wires feeding power to the pump, then fasten the outer well cover over everything. With any luck, it’ll be twenty five years before you see underneath this cover again.
Watch the video up next for a more detailed look at submersible pump installation tips.
VIDEO: Submersible Pump Installation
Length of pump life is also a function of how often the pump switches ON and OFF. Switching is hard on a pump, so the less often it happens the better. Increasing the size of the pressure tank is one way to reduce pump cycling, but there’s another way, too. The video up next shows how the installation of a small valve brings pump cycling down to an absolute minimum, and it does this even when the system has a very tiny pressure tank.
Watch the video up next for a detailed look at the Cycle Stop valve and see exactly how it works.