Electric pumps are a beautiful thing. My great-grandfather and grandpa would spend days in South Dakota installing a single windmill pump for a water well. Now, it usually takes us an hour at the most to install an electric well or cistern pump — all with flow and pressure results that are much more reliable and impressive than my great-grandfather could’ve ever imagined.
Yet, as great as they are, electric pumps can be a headache (at best) if and when they burn up. A quality electric pump should last upwards of 15 years of continual household use. There are certain precautions you can take to ensure that your pump lives out its fullest potential.
First, why does a pump burn up? Typically, pumps die on us because they ran dry. In other words, the cistern or well ran out of water, but the pump kept running… and running… and running. Pumps are designed so that incoming water, as it passes through the pump body and the impellers, acts as a cooling agent to keep the motor cool. Without water, the motor runs hot, and as it heats up, impellers start to warp, bearings start to give, and the motor starts to seize.
The best way to prevent your pump from burning up, then, is to prevent it from ever running dry. (And by the way, this is true for both above-ground jet pumps and submersible pumps.) There are a few different ways of accomplishing this:
1) A Normally-Open Float Switch — A float switch is just what it sounds like: a floating switch. Picture a light switch that rides the water level. When the water level is high, the switch is up and the power is on. When the water level is low, the float switch drops down and turns the power off. There are two types: normally closed and normally open. One turns the power off when the water level is down (normally open), and the other turns power on when the water level is down (normally closed — generally used to trigger a low-water alarm). If you want to absolutely guarantee that your pump will never run dry, interrupt your pump’s power supply with a normally open float switch and set it to cut power when the water level is still just above your pump’s intake. (By the way, we carry a pump with a built-in float switch.)
2) A Low-Pressure Cut-Off Pressure Switch — A pressure switch is the most popular method for controlling a pump (automatically turning it on and off). There’s an alternative version with a toggle switch on the side that responds to low-pressure situations. Specifically, when water pressure dips below 12 PSI, the toggle disconnects the pump’s circuit and shuts it off. 12 PSI is significant because a properly sized, functioning pump doesn’t just dip that low unless something else is going on — and often, what’s going on is that the pump has started drawing air and is struggling to build pressure. A low-pressure cut-off switch does a great job at saving pumps (especially above-ground jet pumps). The one downside: to get your pump running again, you have to manually pull up on the toggle switch and hold it until pressure builds back up. A small hassle, but if you’re looking for a cheap and easy pump-saving solution, this may be just your ticket.
3) A PumpSaver — PumpSavers are electronic sensors that detect amperage draws. When a pump draws air (i.e., when the tank is low), it pulls lower-than-normal amperage. The PumpSaver detects that differential and initiates a shutdown of the pump circuit. It then continues to re-test the circuit at a preset cycle period — adjustable between 2 and 225 minutes — and keeps the pump off until normal operating amperage returns. PumpSavers are excellent products and do a great job protecting pumps. They’re also a great fit for low-producing well systems where the well pump feeds into a reservoir tank. In terms of price, this is the most expensive option of the three — but it’s also the most hands-off.
Thanks for reading!
