Have you seen the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”?? I love it! It is goofy as can be and makes me laugh. Thus; the title of this post.
Remember I mentioned the water pump cycling issue I was having back here? Well, it continued after that post.
And… things got worse this past weekend.
I opened a faucet at one point, a little water ran out, and then it stopped.
Hmm… says I. That is something new.
I was immediately suspicious of the pump given recent events but I followed the typical troubleshooting scenario…
Is the water pump switch on? Yes.
Is there power to the switch? Yes.
Is there power to the pump electrical connections? Yes.
And so on.
Nothing obvious turned up so I disassembled the pump. I found that plastic innards of the pressure adjustment section were broken. After cleaning this up and reassembling, still no water. I wired around the pump pressure switch and whalla! It ran.
I think all the pump cycling of late (think on-off-on-off really fast a whole bunch of times) caused that switch to fail.
I suspect one of the really bad things might be getting stuck somewhere with a hundred gallons of water and no way to access it.
That was not the case here. I’m certainly not stuck and, in the absolute worst case, I have the water tank drain line. I could drain water from it into a bucket if I had to. In this case, the solution was pretty simple. Just wire around the pump switch and control the pump with the master switch in the electrical cabinet (inside). The negative to this is that I have to maintain the pressure manually. So, I turn it on for a bit to let the pressure accumulator accumulate pressure – Ha! Say that a few times – Then turn it off until the pressure drops again.
Until I got into the shower…
You see, I didn’t want to let the pump run for a long while as the pressure could climb to high for the plumbing – think water leak.
No matter, it worked ok. Flip the pump on, dash into the shower, and as soon as I turned the shower water off, dash to turn the switch off again. I figured this was an opportunity to mop the floor! 🙂
A new water pump was ordered immediately. I thought about trying to only order the specific parts but decided a replacement would be easier and I would then have the old pump to use as a spare.
After the pump arrived, I dropped it in place fully expecting all of my problems to be solved.
Not so….
The pump worked like it should but the short cycling continued.
Argghhhh!
Why oh why?!?!?
I re-read the instructions for my pressure accumulator. I reset the accumulator pressure. I bled the system. Nothing mattered.
I then started thinking about removing the water hammer arrester that I placed in my water lines. No… don’t do that…
Finally, I realized that the problem really started when I changed water filters. I had recognized this relationship and thought of air in the lines or some such. I had not considered the filters themselves. This time, it dawned on my that I used a different type of carbon filter – a unit that filters down to .5 micron – a much more restrictive filter than what I had previously. Perhaps the pump was pushing water up against this filter, seeing that the target pressure had been reached, and shutting off. Then a bit of water made it thru the filter dropping the water pressure and causing the whole thing to repeat – over and over, really fast. I pulled the filter out and tried the system.
TADAAA!!! No more water pump short cycling!
Clearly the carbon water filter was more restrictive than the water pump could handle. I like the ‘better’ quality filter but not if it destroys my water pump. So, I’m currently running with only a sediment filter and have a 5 micron carbon filter ordered. I believe that’s what I had previously and it worked ok with the pump.
To be clear, all water into the coach (house or holding tank) passes thru a sediment filter and a .5 micron filter. When pumped out of the tank and into the house, the water again passes thru a sediment filter and carbon filter. It was this second carbon filter that was the issue.
You are quite the detective!