Mainer, that correlates to what I saw with the dewatering pumps. I upsized my outflow pipe from 3"-4" going to plastic pipe as soon as I could. Running the pump at a bit over idle reduced fuel consumption further, but I saw about a 50% reduction in water moved. Using a 6 gallon outboard motor tank as a remote tank I could run the pump for about 28 hours on 3/4 throttle, and about 23 hours on WOT. I had about 250 feet of 4" pipe on the discharge side to get it further away from the pond.
We will be starting a project as soon as we can get the OK from the county, and the contractor said that if the project needed to be dewatered, they'd dig a 30' deep french drain around the perimeter of the pond area, backfill and connect the drain to surface pumps. Last project they did they used 6 diesel pumps, each connected to the 6" french drain system. It was not cheap they said.
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