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

Understood. Thanks for the clarification.

Kinda confusing to someone who doesn't work with these types of devices.

Once you get the actual physical parameters of your well established, we'll take the next step, along with input from your driller. The electricians part of this is pretty easy.

Maybe do some pond monitoring in the future? You need many, many more gizmo's They're fun!

Got a message from the driller today, but couldn't get back in touch. Tomorrow's another day!

What specific parameters do you need?

I won't need anything until your well is established, other than that, it is a guessing game at this point.

I will not know myself, for my own well, until the hole is actually in the ground and I can see what's up! Then I can make the final decisions.

When dealing with unknown's, it's best to take it a step at a time. You can get within reason thru research/fact finding and really narrow it down, but it may not totally match the reality of the circumstance. You can prepare for many scenarios tho, and get a good fuzzy feeling, but until you get factual data, you wont have anything real to work with.

Just something to think about.

Some of those parameters can be adjusted before the well is sunk, like well casing size and well location from electric service.

Some things I know already because there is another well in close proximity. Head, aquifier GPM availability, line voltage, are known. Distance from well to electric supply could be determined and moved - it's a pretty open area.

On another note, I have some aluminum wire. Without measuring it, IIRC, it's 100-120 feet in length, and it is 4/0-4/0-2/0 with 4 AWG ground. Is it useable or do I have to buy something else? I know it depends on motor size.

What I plan on doing is putting in a service building. Not too big, maybe 16 x 24 at the max, but built pretty heavy duty. This would be quite close to the well, close enough just to get the rig in without any trouble. I'll also have my electric service dropped here. This will be the distribution center for water and electricity, and it would be pretty much centrally located for where everything has to go. Enough of this.

I still have to look up what wire is suitable for going down in the well from a VFD, but typically, you would want to use something like this from the drive to the motor: VFD Cable Hope that didn't scare you

It all depends on the drive manufacturers recommendations on how to rig one of their gizmos up.

Because this is low voltage, we probably won't have to worry about Reflected Wave Phenomenon, if you buy a quality gizmo. That sounds scary, but all it really is are very short, high voltage spikes that occasionally happen, and that can toast a motor in very much less time than a blink of an eye. Grundfos stated that their motors can eat 850 volt spikes all the time. Probably would never see 600 volt spikes at these low voltages, so I am not worried about that.

Corona Discharge, which I am sure a few on here have discharged a few Basically what this is, is when these high voltage occurrences happen and you have crappy wire with variable insulation. At the thin points in the insulation, a micro arc can occur. This little arc will produce Ozone. The Ozone will degrade the insulation on the wire, and when that happens, you may want a Corona or two!

You will want a line reactor on the input to the drive to clean up possible crap from the power company. They are pretty cheap. You can also put a line reactor on the output to the motor which will pretty much clean up these issues so you can use, lower cost, but decent quality wire going to the pump. All depends on the VFD tho. Don't want aluminum from the drive to pump, but OK for feeding the drive from the mains.

O.K. I understood some of that!

Glad you did i sure don't lol

JKB, I sent you some literature on waterproof connections and wire that I got at the PB convention. I wonder if they have any wire that would work for this application?

Esshup, I'll look when I get to work today. I don't remember seeing any wire, but those connectors were really nice.

Nope, no wire.

We have a lot of sources for wire and cable tho. I'll do some digging later.

JKB:

Pump question:

If I wanted the capabality to pump at least 200gpm, using a 3 phase motor, would the 300S30-1B Grundflos be best for the application, or is there other things that I need to know before I can make that decision? That one is 3 hp

It is one to consider as long as the head pressure works for you.

JKB, just talked to a company today that makes phase converters. They said that a VSD that was 2x as large as needed would also work as a phase converter.

They also didn't think that running a larger motor that had the capability to pump more gph at a slower speed would save any energy over a smaller motor running at a faster speed to get the same gph.

Thoughts? I think I see 3 choices. 3, 5 and 7.5 hp. If looking at the 320gph models, the determining factor is the head.

With that said, I think running a 3 phase with a VSD is a safer bet because I actually don't know how many gpm will be needed to keep the pond full.

Controls will be in an enclosed structure, that protects them from the weather.

I'm not trying to sell you anything

I know, I know. I'm trying to do research on my own because I may have to consult with a client on putting a well on their property that is identical to what I'm going to want. That well might go in sooner than mine, so I want to have my book of knowledge ready for the task.

Same aquifier, same soils, roughly same pond size. Only difference is the distance from electric source to the well.

I've been asked to contact well drillers to get estimates.....

If it gets any more urgent, I may be asking you if you have a free day on the weekend and I'll take a drive for a crash course in 3 phase and VSD's.

I've had a couple phase converters. These were the static type. They would run a motor, but not at full speed or power. They did not produce a balanced 3 phase output. A VFD takes in the AC line power, converts it into DC, chops it up, and outputs it as 3 phase AC. This is true, be it single or three phase input.

A while back, we had a rotary phase converter built for a customer. I saw it on the dock and asked what that is for. He said it was for a guy who needed to run a couple large motors for blowers. I asked, why not just use a VFD? Said he looked them up and the largest single phase input was 3 hp. These were like 15 hp. Told him that pretty much any decent VFD made today will run from a single phase source. There are a few parameters that need to be set. Some call it phase loss protection... With a VFD specifically intended to run on 3 phase, you do have to multiply the VFD size x 1.73 to run from single phase. Would have saved the customer some cash up front and in the long run in electric savings.

As far as I see it, there are no benefits using a phase converter over a VFD. Static phase converters will rob power and diminish performance, and with rotary, you have an extra mouth to feed because you have to run the motor on the phase converter too! Absolutely no other performance or efficiency benefits either. I think the VFD guy's will side with me.

If you follow the Affinity Laws for pumps, you will see that VFD's work out to an advantage.

I have to remind the guy from Square-D to get me the manual on the 5 hp drive. I am leaning that way.

You know the old saying, "If it were easy, then everyone would be doing it"!

They did say that if I was going to run a VFD that it had to be rated at twice the motor size, and that a correctly sized VFD takes the place of a phase converter.

I guess it all depends on the motor size, which is goverened by the head. Is head determined by static water level in the well casing? Or by something else?

Well esshup, I see that this has taken a few steps backward and fallen off a cliff. There is absolutely no way a phase converter can take the place of a VFD. They have it backwards

Phase converters use to be the norm for someone wanting to run 3 phase equipment from a single phase source. The market for phase converters is not industrial in nature. It's the guy in his garage with a piece of equipment. If I can get the motor to turn, that would be cool!, and then you deal with it. Electricity is way too expensive to use phase converters these days. Hell, you can build your own phase converter and cut the middle man out

Head is determined by pressure, and all inclusive pressure that the pump has to deal with to get the output desired.

Don't quite think there is a 1 day crash course available, anywhere!

We'll keep plugging away at it tho. Not very simple, and it is difficult to lay out the very detailed information required, on a discussion web site.

I need to think about buying some new fishing poles and other rig hardware so I can test out the glutinous cache of Stubby Steve's

Well, that's easy enough then. Phase converters are out.

O.K. I'll have 3 pumps for ya. Then we can go from there. Will that work? Head pressure, outlet pipe size, distance from pump to pond, distance from pump to electric supply.

What else am I missing?

Maybe, you start explaining it!

I got some fish to try and catch! don't know where yet, but they will be caught

O.K. Will do. Probably later on this weekend. This weekend is super busy for me.

Don't forget elbows and such.

It's gonna be a really crappy day outside. Guess I'll put off the the fishing till a better day. Forecast has snow today, rain all next week, then snow again next Friday. Yuck!

I'll just work on the panel layout and wiring diagram for the distribution building. I'll have a new Powerflex 525 drive here next week to test out. The two I ordered are 1HP units for a couple pumps I have.

Here is a link to Mathcad: Mathcad Express

I was going to post this a couple weeks ago when I installed it, but screwed up and went to the full blown trial instead.

I've had Mathcad since 1990 and it is a great tool. The last upgrade I got was version 12 in 2008. This was right before PTC bought Math Soft.

What I wanted to see, if the applications I had written over the years with the full version would open up in the free version. Have to wait a couple more weeks to do that. Full blown version is 1500 bucks.

Pump applications like this are an excellent candidate for spending some time and developing a Mathcad App. The free version would probably do quite well.

EDIT:
The free version wont convert my other stuff. Pretty fancy calculator tho, and you can save your stuff. Oh, yeah.. it works pretty nice. Quite a bit different than version 12.