What pressure lost on community well

[klebel]

Hey All,

We live on a cul de sac that shares a community well. There are 6 house on it and we are at the end of the line and are up hill a good 100 ft from the well. Water pressure is around 20 lbs coming into the house. What options do I have to get the water pressure back up at where it comes into our house? Can I get away with just a pressure tank or should I add a 1/2 hp pump in line as well? We live in a 2 story house with a walk out basement. The water comes in at a crawl space below our kitchen. ALL of our faucets, etc are at least one story above where the water comes in. Any ideas or advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

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[klebel]

Hey All,

We live on a cul de sac that shares a community well. There are 6 house on it and we are at the end of the line and are up hill a good 100 ft from the well. Water pressure is around 20 lbs coming into the house. What options do I have to get the water pressure back up at where it comes into our house? Can I get away with just a pressure tank or should I add a 1/2 hp pump in line as well? We live in a 2 story house with a walk out basement. The water comes in at a crawl space below our kitchen. ALL of our faucets, etc are at least one story above where the water comes in. Any ideas or advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

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[Nestor Kelebay]

If it were me, I would probably put in a water storage tank in your basement where the well water comes in. Make the tank large enough so that it'll hold more water than you're ever likely to use in a single day. I'd say 200 gallons would be plenty. Then connect a pump controlled by a pressure switch to pump water into your house's water supply piping. All of that would be upstream of your water heater.

The idea here is that you're seldom using water. All the time you're at work or asleep, water from the well can flow into your storage tank at low pressure to keep it full. Whenever you do use water, the pressure switch will detect the pressure drop in your water piping and turn on the pump to ensure you have good water pressure in your piping at all times, so that you don't even know that the water coming into the house is coming in at low pressure.

------------------------------------- ..in solidarity with the movement for change in Iran.

[klebel]

responding to

klebel wrote: Interesting. So you would use a standard water holding tank but not a pressurized tank to reduce how often the pump is cycling? I was looking at getting an 80 gal pressurized tank and about a 1 hp jet pump that could flow 15 gpm at 50 psi. I would have the pump push water into the pressurized tank and the water would flow from the pressurized tank to the rest of the house. I would put a pressure switch on the output of the tank so that if the pressure dropped below my 50 lbs, the jet pump would kick back on. You wouldn't go that route?

Nestor Kelebay wrote:

If it were me, I would probably put in a water storage tank in your

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[Nestor Kelebay]

responding to

Nestor Kelebay wrote: klebel:

I wouldn't go that route because you're saying that the water comes into your house at a slow rate. I'd be concerned that the delivery of water to the house would be the bottle neck, and having a pump in your system wouldn't help at all in getting higher water pressure in the house piping if the piping from the well can't provide water as fast as you're using it.

By allowing the well to fill up a storage tank overnight, and then using a pump to pump that water into the piping in your house, you overcome the bottle neck of the supply of water to your house, but the pump will cycle on and off every time water is drawn out of your house's water supply piping.

Now I'm starting to think that it might be best to have a second smaller storage tank (this one pressurized with air) downstream of the pump. A pressure switch on that second tank would turn the pump on to pump water into that pressurized tank. And, air compressed above the water in that second tank is what would deliver water to your faucets with good pressure. That would address the problem of the pump cycling on and off every time you used some water.