About the service
I start every job at the well head with a line and a weight. The static water level and the drawdown under load are the two numbers that decide everything else. If the mirror sits within about seven metres and the run to the house is short, a surface station on a vibration pad in a warm room is the quiet, serviceable answer: you can reach it, service it, and a spare part costs very little. Deeper than that, or with a long horizontal trench, and I put a submersible pump into the casing and keep only the tank and the automation indoors. Head is calculated, never guessed: the vertical lift, roughly one metre of loss for every ten metres of pipework, plus the pressure you actually want to feel in the upstairs shower.
The diaphragm tank is sized against how often you are willing to let the motor start, not by the number printed on the box. A vessel that is too small makes the pump chatter every time somebody washes their hands, and the capacitor and the membrane are gone within a season. I charge the air side to about ten percent below the cut-in pressure and I check it with the water drained out of the tank, which is the step almost everyone skips. The pressure switch is then trimmed on site: cut-in, cut-out and the differential between them, so the shower no longer swings between a trickle and a hammer. A check valve holds the column, a coarse mesh filter keeps sand away from the impeller, and dry-run protection cuts the motor before it cooks itself in August when the level drops.
Electrics are not an afterthought here. The station gets its own circuit, a residual current device and a real earth conductor bonded to the house earthing loop — a wet pump on an ungrounded line is the one fault on a plot that can genuinely kill. The pit or the entry into the house is insulated below the frost line, and the drain point is set so that the whole run empties by gravity. Before the first frost I walk you through the five minutes that winterising actually takes: cut the power, open the drain, empty the tank, blow out the outdoor branch, leave the taps open.
What the job includes:
— level measurement and head calculation by floors and pipe length;
— choice of surface station or submersible pump, tank and automation;
— pipework: check valve, coarse filter, gauge, five-way fitting;
— dedicated supply line, RCD, earthing, dry-run relay;
— insulated pit or house entry, winter drain point;
— commissioning, switch adjustment, pressure test and a winterising briefing.
A typical country installation takes one to three days depending on the length of the run and whether the pit is ready.
The diaphragm tank is sized against how often you are willing to let the motor start, not by the number printed on the box. A vessel that is too small makes the pump chatter every time somebody washes their hands, and the capacitor and the membrane are gone within a season. I charge the air side to about ten percent below the cut-in pressure and I check it with the water drained out of the tank, which is the step almost everyone skips. The pressure switch is then trimmed on site: cut-in, cut-out and the differential between them, so the shower no longer swings between a trickle and a hammer. A check valve holds the column, a coarse mesh filter keeps sand away from the impeller, and dry-run protection cuts the motor before it cooks itself in August when the level drops.
Electrics are not an afterthought here. The station gets its own circuit, a residual current device and a real earth conductor bonded to the house earthing loop — a wet pump on an ungrounded line is the one fault on a plot that can genuinely kill. The pit or the entry into the house is insulated below the frost line, and the drain point is set so that the whole run empties by gravity. Before the first frost I walk you through the five minutes that winterising actually takes: cut the power, open the drain, empty the tank, blow out the outdoor branch, leave the taps open.
What the job includes:
— level measurement and head calculation by floors and pipe length;
— choice of surface station or submersible pump, tank and automation;
— pipework: check valve, coarse filter, gauge, five-way fitting;
— dedicated supply line, RCD, earthing, dry-run relay;
— insulated pit or house entry, winter drain point;
— commissioning, switch adjustment, pressure test and a winterising briefing.
A typical country installation takes one to three days depending on the length of the run and whether the pit is ready.
