well water pressure loss over distance

According to Glover's Pocket Ref -2nd ed- 10 gpm thru a 2" plastic pipe will loose .03 gpm per 100'. Glover's Pocket Ref is a very handy book.

If you have anything near 10 gpm at the wellhead, you will have more water than you will ever use, even if you went 3000 feet.

I have a very small spring that produces about one gallon per minute. I pipe it 1200 feet uphill, and never have any problem.

Good luck !!

--james--

You need to worry more about how much rise (or fall) the line has. Each foot of rise will reduce Pressure (not volume) by about .4 lb i believe it is.

bodega -

I hope you don't lose any gpm....cuz all the water going to the pipe at the well head better be coming out of the pipe at the house....otherwise you've invented a "matter destroyer"

Your pump has certain preformance capability

flow (gpm) at various pressure (head) levels

ranging from.......

lots of flow at very little pressure to very low flow at high pressure

the length, material & condition of the pipe & elevation change will determinw how much head (pressure) drop will be suffered from well head to house

here is a pressure loss calcaulator, you can play around with it

so unless you're pumping a long way uphill in addition to the 600 ft AND you have a really wimpy pump you should be fine

cheers Bob

On my spring which produces 1gpm, I have a two inch plastic pipe that goes 1200 feet to our cabin, and has a total rise of 300 feet.

I have a 1 hp pump, that pumps water pefectly fine to the cabin, and I set my pressure tank at 50 psi, and it works just great !

The spring site has a 300 gal storage reservoir, so our 4 member family never runs out, even at this very very low water rate of 1 gpm.

If you have as much as 3 or 4 gpm, you can simply quit worrying about running a pipe 600 feet. You can do all the calculations you want, but what you really want to know is will you have plenty of water and good pressure, and I can tell you that you will !!

--James--

Mike-

Maybe he's talking about the well / spring flow capacity not usage demand / supply at the house.

He's using the 300 gal storage reservoir at the spring site as a means of supplying the drawn down demand of the cabin use?

A 1 hp pump would run dry in a heart beat if only supplied w/ 1 gpm.......

he needs ~140psi just to over come the rise.

Fed law water saving showerheads are 2.5gpm, faucets about the same

so the 3 to 4 gpm house supply would be rather lean

IMO a house / cabin with more than one person needs more like 10 gpm to give decent performance.

cheers Bob

Bob's estimate sounds about right for the required flow rate available in the house -- think showers and laundry + toilet flushing all at once. That's why there should be a pressure/reserve tank at the house. As long as the tank is big enough you can have a very low volume flow to the tank from the well or spring.

BTW, this is the classic calculus problem of filling a tank at one rate and drawing it down at a higher rate. How long before the tank is empty?