Midnight Well Maintenance

[MCL]

It's after midnight and I just got running water in the house again. The breaker for the pump started tripping this evening. I started troubleshooting the obvious things like the breaker and pressure switch-no luck. Then I saw a frayed wire where it goes through the side of the breaker box to the pressure switch. I thought "ah-ha got it now". Replaced that section of wire. Wrong-not it. The modern-day well is in the old well pit outside the house. I redid all the wire connections out there. No go. I had just about decided that it was the pump itself and was ready to give up since it is 200 or 300 or whatever feet in the ground. I found a roll of #10 romex cable and ran a jumper wire from the pressure switch outside to the wellhead. All this while it is pouring rain of course. It worked. So I guess the wire that runs outside underground must have a bad spot in it somewhere. That is the last thing I thought it would be. I guess I will work on that tomorrow. Or is it later today? Whenever it is I am relaxing with a cold one now. At least we have water.

 

[Anonymous-0]

could be a bad breaker, or fuze box too, have had that happen on 230 volt, screw round fer 2 or 3 hrs get it working then next morning same thing.

 

[RetiredCO]

Bad fuse box ?????? now that's a new one, ( I don't think so ) bad breaker, hardly,,,,
bad wire under ground, would be the cause, but if you switch out the breaker with a different one, it would tell right away, but I bet it's the underground wire.

 

[Anonymous-0]

Probably no chance it runs through a pipe to the well? If you have to dig to put a new wire in run it through conduit Makes it a lot easier to change next time whenever that might be.

 

[bc]

Is it dry where you are at?

We have trouble around here with clay next to the foundation when it dries up. It moves down and shrinks. What that does is stress and break either the pipe or wires where they come out of the concrete foundation. Kinda shears them off. With pipe it will bend it to the point of cracking where it comes out of the foundation. It could do it as well where wires cross rocks or roots.

Same thing for phone and electric wires that are buried and come up into a box. The shrinking ground will pull the wires loose from the box.

Fix for that is to keep clay and heavy soil a foot back from the foundation which is something the good contractors do around here. Use sand or light gravel next to the foundation. If you have to trench in new wire use steel conduit coming out of the foundation for a foot or two or the lenght of a 10' stick and then you can switch to pvc conduit if you want.

 

[MCL]

It was the wire that goes from the pressure switch out to the well. It ran partway through a small tile and then was just buried in dirt the rest of the way. It was no big deal to dig up and pull the new one through. I'm just glad it wasn't the pump.

 

[Anonymous-0]

Remember the old farm houses that people just added the small 4x6" fuse box beside the main fuse box? have repaired two of them in the past 12 years because they would only make contract on 1 pole when you flip the lever on the side of the box. seems also that you have never had a bad breaker, they do go bad. SO yeah I think SO, just wanted to let the guy know in case it wasn't the under ground wire

 

[RetiredCO]

Interesting, it could be that defect you state was changed on the fuse box now days.
however, it was the underground wire after all, most times it's the wire,
I seen this many times when a rock would push against the wire and make the wire bad.
I wonder if he has Good Underground wire installed,

 

[Anonymous-0]

agree 100%

 

[showcrop]

(quoted from post at 19:34:40 10/20/11) Remember the old farm houses that people just added the small 4x6" fuse box beside the main fuse box? have repaired two of them in the past 12 years because they would only make contract on 1 pole when you flip the lever on the side of the box. seems also that you have never had a bad breaker, they do go bad. SO yeah I think SO, just wanted to let the guy know in case it wasn't the under ground wire

Yes, the house where we used to live had one of those little fuse boxes next to the meter box on the second floor. When we bought the place there was a pile of burned out fuses on a table next to it. I rewired it pretty soon after we bought it. And yes I have replaced a few bad breakers. They are good for only so many trips and they can get abused in commercial applications.