upgrading from 'well water' to 'municipal water'
- Thread starter electron
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mustangcoupe
Senior Member
murphy
Member
simple answer (, recomanded to me by WayneW) :
http://jerman.com/dljcmeters.html
My watermeter was $92 incl S&H and is working without any issue since a long time.
Even though my well-water contains a lot of iron AND
I'm using a lot of water for the irrigation of hundreds of small trees.
Of course, maybe you need another / bigger model for your house ...
BTW, if ever possible I would hold the option of an own well.
Even if the operating costs of this water are not too attractive!
With city-water you have even less influence of the price, more excatly zero!
Monk
Active Member
I would cal the dude, tell him you had posted the picture of the finished product, and that someone mentioned that connecting dissimilar metals wasn't a good idea - give him a chance to swap in a plastic piece or explain why it's going to be OK.
sda
Active Member
FWIW, direct connection of copper to iron is prohibited by most, if not all, modern plumbing codes. If the city made you hire a real plumber for this, then I'd guess the plumber should have pulled a permit and the work should be inspected at some point. If its been inspected and approved, call the city and complain about their lousy service. If it hasn't been inspected, call the guy and ask him to fix the problem before the city finds it. Let us know how it plays out.
Another thing ... since this is in your basement, consider putting a manual shutoff valve on the output side of the ELK valve. If you ever have to service the ELK valve or your DLJ meter, this will keep the house water from draining into the basement. Gravity, you know.
And another thing ... If you don't have a main shutoff between the city meter and your DLJ meter, you should add another manual shutoff before your DLJ meter.
And one more thing ... This would be a good time to put a whole house water filter in. Something like this will keep the dirt clods out of your house plumbing and not restrict flow too much.
http://www.filtersfast.com/Pentek-150237-1...ter-housing.asp
http://www.filtersfast.com/American-Plumbe...ter-filters.asp
The best advice I can give you is to buy a torch and learn to do it yourself.
Another thing ... since this is in your basement, consider putting a manual shutoff valve on the output side of the ELK valve. If you ever have to service the ELK valve or your DLJ meter, this will keep the house water from draining into the basement. Gravity, you know.
And another thing ... If you don't have a main shutoff between the city meter and your DLJ meter, you should add another manual shutoff before your DLJ meter.
And one more thing ... This would be a good time to put a whole house water filter in. Something like this will keep the dirt clods out of your house plumbing and not restrict flow too much.
http://www.filtersfast.com/Pentek-150237-1...ter-housing.asp
http://www.filtersfast.com/American-Plumbe...ter-filters.asp
The best advice I can give you is to buy a torch and learn to do it yourself.
felixrosbergen
Senior Member
So the recommendation for water flow monitor seems pretty clear. Does anybody have a water pressure meter integrated in any way?
My plan is to use a brultech to check when the pump is on and the flow meter to check the gallons per minute and the pressure meter..well for the PSI ofcourse. The purpose of all this is to try and 'tune' the system by using different nozzles on the sprinkler heads (depending in which type of sprinkler you get they come with a bunch of heads for different GPM and PSI) such that i maximize the gallons per minute and minimize the pump cycling. The goal is to get a constant flow..if the pump is cycling the pressure will go up and down between 50 and 70 PSI, so that keeps changing the throw distance on the heads.
My plan is to use a brultech to check when the pump is on and the flow meter to check the gallons per minute and the pressure meter..well for the PSI ofcourse. The purpose of all this is to try and 'tune' the system by using different nozzles on the sprinkler heads (depending in which type of sprinkler you get they come with a bunch of heads for different GPM and PSI) such that i maximize the gallons per minute and minimize the pump cycling. The goal is to get a constant flow..if the pump is cycling the pressure will go up and down between 50 and 70 PSI, so that keeps changing the throw distance on the heads.
The thing you need to be most concerned about for the well pump is to make sure it isn't short cycling. As you noted, you want to get a constant flow to keep the pressure from changing. What that implies is that the pump will be going on and off as the pressure changes, which will drastically shorten the life of the pump.
You may want to look into a cycle stop valve. It will keep the pump running at a constant pressure at all flow rates as long as the flow is above a specific level, usually one or two GPM's, once the pressure has dropped to the designated CSV pressure.
I have the same issues you do, but so far it has been easy for me to set up the zones/heads such that each zone matched the pump's capacity of 28 GPM. My well pump runs for over two hours at 50 PSI while irrigating without the pump shutting off even once. Future zones will be harder, so I will probably install a CSV.
Also, keep in mind that for a given zone, the nozzles should be matched. That is, a nozzle with a 180* arc should put out twice as much water as a nozzle with a 90* arc, etc. Otherwise, you will get uneven watering within a zone.
felixrosbergen
Senior Member
28GPM..wow..must be nice... i have a 1/2HP pump and i'm being told i'm getting about 7GPM or so.. so my zones will only have 3 or 4 heads.. lots of zones and valves to compensate for that.
Here is a web site with a lot of info on sizining a system using a pump.
http://www.irrigationtutorials.com/sprinkler00.htm
GM
http://www.irrigationtutorials.com/sprinkler00.htm
GM
My pump is 1.5HP. The well is only about 140 feet deep, and I think the water level in the well is about 60 feet. Currently, I have about 1/2 acre under irrigation, using four zones (plus one for landscaping). Another 1/2 acre to go, and more landscaping. Takes a lot of water during the summer in SE Texas.
felixrosbergen
Senior Member
the irrigationtutorials website is really informative and i've gone over it forwards and backwards....it goes into way too much details though..I've spoken to 3 professional installers and none of them actually do the bucket test or anything like that. Once i tell them i have a 1/2HP motor that is pretty much all they need to know.
When i mention pump cycling all of them seem to more of less say that it's not easy to prevent. I think by playing with the nozzle sizes you can tune each zone in (e.g. of a zone has less heads you would want higher GPM nozzles on those) but this takes a lot of time and tinkering which is not good for profitability of a commercial operation.
If i move forward and get a system installed i certainly will be asking for something with exchangable nozzls since the pump cycling is important to me, but from the point of view of wear and tear on the pump as well as the consistency (no pressure changes during the cycles) of the sprinkler performance. The 20PSI change from the high cutout to the low cutin of the pressure tank is way to much for consistent performance i expect.
When i mention pump cycling all of them seem to more of less say that it's not easy to prevent. I think by playing with the nozzle sizes you can tune each zone in (e.g. of a zone has less heads you would want higher GPM nozzles on those) but this takes a lot of time and tinkering which is not good for profitability of a commercial operation.
If i move forward and get a system installed i certainly will be asking for something with exchangable nozzls since the pump cycling is important to me, but from the point of view of wear and tear on the pump as well as the consistency (no pressure changes during the cycles) of the sprinkler performance. The 20PSI change from the high cutout to the low cutin of the pressure tank is way to much for consistent performance i expect.
felixrosbergen
Senior Member
So does anybody think there is a real benefit to monitoring the pressure? The GPM monitoring seems sensible and relatively easy with a 1 wire pulse counter.. analog pressure readings are probably a whole different ballgame.
All of my sprinkler heads (except for the ones in flower beds) are Hunter PGP with standard red nozzles. According to the manual, a 20PSI difference will vary the distance thrown by about four feet for most of the nozzles. Since I have a fairly open yard with a large area to water and lots of water volume, it was pretty easy to design the system myself once I did the bucket test. For each zone, it was easy to determine which nozzle to use for each head based on nozzle arc, nozzle flow, and total water volume available. For all four zones, the numbers were accurate, i.e., what the calculations said should happen did happen.
Since pump cycling was/is a primary consideration for me, I have a data logger on the pump circuit that logs when the pump starts and when it stops. I know for a fact that it runs for over two hours at a time without shutting off. I don't understand why your pro's say it isn't easy to keep it from cycling. Did you ask them about using a cycle stop valve? One of the additional benefits of a cycle stop valve is that if you are using a bladder tank, you can get away with using a very small one.
Another key is to make sure the entire system can handle to flow so that there isn't any inherent back pressure causing the pump to cycle. All of my trunk lines are 1.5" (sch40 upstream of the valves, sch20 downstream) which can handle a lot more than the 28GPM my pump puts out. The branch lines are all 1" sch20, and there is never more than one head on a branch line. In other words, my piping can easily handle the flow required of it with minimal backpressure. However, most pro's would say I've gone way overboard.
I've often times thought about measuring both flow and pressure, but haven't done either yet. It would probably be interesting to monitor both, but I haven't come up with compelling reasons to do so yet.
Logging pump start/stop has actually helped. At one point, I saw that my pump was cycling about every 20 minutes, even throughout the nite. It turned out that I had a bad check valve and it was allowing water to flow back into the well, thus reducing pressure in the tank. I guess monitoring system pressure would have told me the same thing.
Monitoring flow downstream of my water softener also may have benefits, although I don't do it. I have a twin tank softener that regenerates based on water usage. After about 850 gallons of water flow, it regen's immediately. I have a data logger on the softener that logs all regenerations. Monitoring downstream flow would validate that the softener is regen'ing at the right intervals. It could also let me know that the softener is getting close to a regen in case I want to check the salt level.
I thought about monitoring pressure so I could do an alert if for some reason the pressure got above or below the pump pressure set points. That could maybe save you some grief if your water heater wasn't working correctly, or warn you before it got to the point that a pressure relief valve was about to open.
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