Pond Boss Forums FISH & FISHING Sunfish-Including Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass BG Bedding & Well output pics

Noticed late yesterday that the BG where sweeping out beds in places they normally do not bed with the water a little higher than normal. I decided to raise the 3 acre pond 6" overnight to give them some more depth to keep from exposing those beds if the water where to drop. Attached you can see the high volume well pumping in water when I turned it on right at 7pm last night. The other photo is showing how the water rose covering the 6" pipe overnight (taken just after 7 this morning) after I had shut the well off.
I burned 130 KWH(@ $.0975 farm rate) which totals out to around $12.67 to raise the 3 acre pond near 6" overnight.

Edit: KWH said 13 and was supposed to say 130.

You are a lucky man. ok maybe lucky isn't the word. You should be a happy man!!!

Sweet man.. I need that set up I would think that high volume saves money in the long run after initial build cost..

Thanks

FNC I am a Happy Lucky man.

BGK It sure does help to know that in the height of summer with no rain I can keep the pond full for less than $100. Not to mention all the other outside the box benefits in pond management of having a great supply of right at 70F water. I have used it to keep temps down in summer while areating. I have also used it to extend growing seasons by pumping in warmer water during short cold spells in early winter. I had about 7.5K in this well intially and as I understand now the price would probably be near 15K for one near the same.

gallons per minute?

Should be between 650-700 gpm to fill 3 acres 6" deep in 12 hours.

Cecil the only time the output was measured was when built. At that time it was pumping 438 gpm with a 7.5hp motor. It has been upgraded to a 10hp one since then. Right now I have little head pressure and I am well exceeding 500 gpm. I pumped between 5 to 6" which would make for an average between 565 to 680 gpm for that run.
Interesting thought is a can pump a semitrailer load of water to bottle in less than 15 min. For a quarter (25 cents).

Impressive! There are a lot folks here that would kill to have that kind of water capacity to top their ponds! Well not literally of course...

Tums,
Did you ever find out what pump head you have? It would be interesting to look it up.

You posted the part number to the motor, and I looked it up. Franklin 10hp, 200V 3Phase. That's an odd duck, but there are still those voltages being supplied out there.

esshup has a real good situation with high ground water supply and low head, and great voltage. An 8" well, 10HP 625gpm 2 stage or so pump. Gonna move an enormous amount of water on the cheap!

I'd be scared to pump that much water out of my aquifer since my house is supplied by a residential well..

I'd be more worried about my neighbors knocking on my door. LOL Believe it or not, being considered a "minor water user" as in under 70 gpm I am not responsible legally in Indiana if my neighbor's well went dry. That said, I wouldn't want to do that to them and I wouldn't want to be the bad guy on the street. LOL My one neighbor is a Marine so...

I'm the same way. Plus I'm the new guy on that street don't wanna be the bad new guy lol..

The aquafier here is HUGE. From reading the code, any person that has the capacity to pump more than 70 GPM from all of the wells combined on the property (not just one well) could be listed. Any large water producer within a half mile could be affected if a well were to go dry. There are multiple center pivot wells going in around here, so I think that if anybody's well went dry all of the large water producers would share the burden.

I've been here 10 years now and I'm one of the "long term" owners. The majority of homes on this street have changed hands at least once since I bought the place. My immediate neighbor to the East has been here 20 years.

With the center pivots going in around here, I don't think that I will have a choice in the matter if I want the pond to stay relatively full.......

JKB, is there a 6" well pump available? I have equipment to drill up to 200' deep, up to 6" dia. Anything larger than that and I'd have to call in a driller.

I figure 200 gpm would be enough, more gpm would just mean less run time on the pump.

I'll talk to the local well driller to see what the aquifier at my place will support. But, I think it'll be more than enough. I know of one farmer that's putting in a 1200 gpm pump for one of their center pivot systems.

I did some checking on the DNR site. I'm in the Eolian Sands Aquifer System, and the registered major water producers have 32 wells in this area, with flow rates up to 1500 gpm. Static water levels have been reported from 5 to 15 feet. Aquifer thickness ranges from 7 to 40 feet in thickness. Wells typically run from 50 to 105 feet deep.

Well, now I have to do some research. I can drill a 6" diameter hole, but I don't know if I can fit a 6" diameter well casing in that hole....

JKB I never did find out exactly what pump head I have down there. Outside of pulling the well I can not find anyone that can tell me.

As far as the water around here we have a great aquifer supply. Alot of the reseidential wells only use one stick of pipe to pump from. I can fill my pond in ruffly to weeks of solid running and not pull down enough water to effect 2 wells that are within a 1/8th of a mile of my well and are both only pumping from around 20' deep and both are drilled over 100' deep. I would be kind enough to pull a well and add another stick of pipe if anyone ever did experience an issue since those wells are on my property are now only used recreationally. You would have thought someone would read a survey before they would drill. There was 2 lots 1 acre big and 1 lot .5 acre big sold out of the property for 2 houses before I bought the surrounding property. I have been a good neighbor since I have wells and part of a barn that I discovered had been done across the property line when I purchased the land. The county ran water this way a few years back and I was a good enough neighbor to help the 2 houses that are not family owned run the county water to their residence. I was thinking of preventing any future issues with the use of those wells way back then.

Plenty of 6" stuff available.




The State (Gestapo) would not allow me to drill my own well because DEQ requirements and such. Ya need to be licensed and certified to comply with all the BS, which is OK by me.

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Something to consider here, so put your thinking cap on.

If it took Tums 5 hours longer to bring his pond level up, to where he did, would that be detrimental to his pond and fish?
Answer here:__________________________

With a proper rig, the extra 5 hours of running the pump to accomplish the goal, would use about 48% of the total energy than what it takes to do it 5 hours quicker, even tho the pump is running for 5 hours longer. Call that crazy!

Same pump and motor, just controlled.

These are reasonable estimates. The reason I know that, is because I scribbled a bunch of junk down for this on the back of an envelope (bad habit), and turned the envelope over for more space, and it was my electric bill That was an omen!

There are many more Nuts-N-Bolts to this tho.

Hmmmmmmm That's interesting!

I'm thinking 6" because I was told the max GPM for a 4" well, even double screened is 100 gpm. I would be much more comfortable with double that.

I think the restricting factor on a 4" is the amount of water that can flow past the motor. They make 3" motor's for 4" wells.

I am reading up on well casings right now.

If you look at the Grundfos 300S with a 5HP motor. The motor is 3.75" diameter, however, the pump is 5.83" diameter.

Next question is, how much clearance do you need within the casing for the pump itself? Need to get wires by and such, plus draw down flow.

One thing I have read in tech manuals and have been told by a few drive guy's is to oversize your pump if you are going to use a VFD.

You can run a 200 gpm pump with a 5 HP motor at full tilt, and get 200 gpm out. You can run a 300 gpm pump with the same 5 hp motor, kick it back 30%, get your 200 gpm out at a great reduction in energy cost's.

You really need to pay attention to what is going to happen with head pressure tho. When you slow the impeller down, your pumping head will also be reduced. In low head applications, this really is not much of a problem. In high head, it's a bit more complicated.

I'm lucky that I have a low head application. The well for the house has a 12'-15' head.

I may have asked this before but is the any advantage to pumping well water with an above ground pump if the head is low?

No advantage Cecil. You have to combine suction lift and head pressure -vs- just head pressure with a submersible pump.

Not sure about this, but if you dropped a suction tube down a well, and you started pumping, then the well was being drawn down, it seems reasonable that the draw down would add to your suction lift, because your operating in more atmospheric conditions.

esshup,
Optimum casing diameter for the larger well pumps, like the 300S I posted above is 8". There are several variations of 6" casing that would probably work, but I am not seeing too many recommendations to go that rout, especially at 200+ gpm. 100 gpm might be OK, but it get's tight inside and could end up with a bunch of trouble.

I am not finding any 4" pumps that will do 200 gpm, or even close.

Best to just plan on an 8" casing.

From a VFD perspective, I never had any issues with these doing their proper job. My big concern has been about the motors. Grundfos specifically stated in one of their engineering guides that they prefer these to be used in Sensorless Vector Control, which is what one would want to do. They did specifically state the limiting factor, and that is the thrust bearing. 3 seconds to 30Hz is a whole lot better than everyone else out there, plus the motors are built properly for VFD control.

I am waiting on a VFD manual from Schneider Electric (Square-D) for their new Pump control that is specifically designed for pumping applications. I did get a price from our vendor and the 5hp rig is 1140.00, 3hp is 610.00 (I can beat them up a bit tho )

I also have the manual for the H2O Drive, which is a pump specific drive. If you scroll thru the PDF real fast, you see a subliminal in the lower right corner that says Yask, which stands for Yaskawa. It's their trademarked text.

Yaskawa is a premier brand and they have their own iQPump rig, plus many others. Quite often these large companies will private label their technology to other companies, give it a new look, but it is the same animal at often a higher price.

The Allen Bradley PowerFlex 525 I posted in the other thread has virtually every type of application built into it. I was set back a bit because this gizmo has about 800 parameter settings Cool thing is, the software is free and you can plug it into your computer -via- Ethernet, open it up in a web browser and see whats really going on in real time. I am going to order a 3HP rig soon to play around with. I have another project with a bunch of A-B stuff that's going out for special negotiated pricing (save a pile that way, but it takes some time), so I thought I would throw that into the mix.

I am done reading stuff for a while.

Thank you sir! 8" it is then. I am going to talk to the well driller tomorrow because a client wants to move forward with a well for his pond (s) and is also looking at 200gpm rate. He has an electrician that he likes to work with, and I will be touching base with him this coming week as well to feel him out on the 3-phase stuff. I'll also see if he knows what the voltage is on the property - they had to run power about 3/8 mile and that's still about 150 yds from where the well is going (or is tentatively planned to go).

These ponds are groundwater ponds, and I think that if we keep one pond full, there will be enough water movement thru the ground to help keep a 2nd pond fuller.

One cool thing about going to a larger pump and a VFD is you have a pretty decent window to play with flow -vs- economy. Pretty much all the drives will display the actual operating parameters like volts, Hz, amps, Kw and such. The fancier ones like the A-B, and I believe the Square-D have built in economic calculators where you plug in KWh rate and they will tell you how many dollars your sucking at the moment and how many you spent since the last time you reset it.

Tie it to a small PLC and HMI and you can do all kinds of fancy things. Punch a dollar figure on the screen, pump me 10 bucks worth, then hit start. All kinds of fancy things can be done.

Let us know what the driller and electrician say.

The lightbulb finally clicked today when I was in the car. Variable speed drive (VSD) Run the motor slower so you aren't using all the HP. Now I see why a much larger pump/motor is more effecient.

I'll let you know what they have to say.

Close, but no, you ARE using all the HP. Pumps are a constant HP (variable torque) application. You still are kicking out the same HP, just slowing the speed down, which increases the torque. You can set VFD's up either way. If you set it up for constant torque (variable hp), when you slow the motor down, your hp drops, but maintains torque. Don't want to do that, it will suck MORE juice.

Lowering the frequency to slow the speed down in constant hp mode will lower your KW consumed while maintaining name plate hp.