And another one.
Recommended Domestic Water Pump
(34 posts) (11 voices)-
LanceTurner
Key MasterI second the statements made earlier about pressure tanks, fit the biggest you can afford, the pump will run a lot less and will last longer.
I've set up a solar system (details in the next ReNew, if I ever get it written up) that powers the pump via a 400 watt sinewave inverter (1200 watt surge capacity). This feeds water from my 2100 litre tank (also an ebay bargain, Aust made poly tank with fittings and gauge, delivered for $440 in total) to the toilet for the moment, will look at other uses later, but most likely it will just be used to water the garden in summer.
This system was a bit of a bargain basement setup actually, the inverter was an $800+ European made unit with 20A inbuilt solar controller, bought for $200 as it was runout stock and didn't have autostart, but it draws very little while idling and hasn't been a problem.
The pump cost a grand total of $106 on ebay inc shipping, it's a cast iron bodied Chinese direct import, works great, built-in pressure switch and only draws 250 watts. Surprisingly, it seems pretty robust, the main valve from the tank was inadvertently closed a while back and the pump ran all night with no water until the battery (200Ah exide solar flooded cell, another ebay runout stock bargain, $260!) went flat. In the morning the pump seemed seized, but I plugged it into the mains and it hummed for a few seconds and started up and still pumps almost like new. I suspect there was a little wear on the rotor, but not much.
To that I added a 24 litre pressure tank and that increased pump runtime and reduced the number of runs each day considerably. There's also now a timer on the inverter so the pump doesn't run between 10pm and 7am.
Posted Thursday 29 Jul 2010 @ 8:13:20 am from IP # -
Just to update this thread with more recent information - we went ahead and installed the Grundfos pump just about a year ago now. It has performed faultlessly since then and pumps an average of 100L/day. I meter the rainwater use so that I know how much we are using.
The water has just the slightest tint to it as our outlet is a little close to the base of the tank. Across the year the tanks only ran low once where I switched our supply over to mains water for a week. The system was switched back over as soon as we had some decent rain.Overall we are very happy with the system. Other than clearing out the first flush every now and then the system basically looks after itself. We will definitely be plumbing the rainwater in to all the toilets when we renovate though I don' think we'll use it as shower or kitchen water as we would have to install more filtration and treatment equipment. The additional expense of this equipment is hard to justify given that we already use a reasonable proportion of rainwater (nearly 50% of total water used).
Posted Thursday 12 May 2011 @ 2:09:54 am from IP #
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