babiegoose.com

so there are things you know you know...

then there are things that you know that you don't know...

and there are things that you don't know that you know...

but there are things that you think you know, but don't know...

there is also a case where you know you know, but you don't know why you know or are quite sure that you know...

but I guess that's just a derivative of one of the other ones from above...

in any case - we just added a pressure booster pump to our house. (We have a community well which give crappy pressure) and we had a plumber install it.

[why the plumber instead of taking on the venture myself? - there was much more work to be done than I cared to take on myself, plus with a professional installation, I can work off the newly installed plumbing instead of botching it up first and paying someone later... I decided that me botching it up later would be cheaper for me to fix that me botching it up first.]

since I wasn't home when the plumber installed the booster, I had vince watch the house while he was there...

the plumber installed everything correctly (there was almost a point where he was going to install the pressure tank incorrectly, but fortunately I caught it - so even experts make mistakes) but for some reason the pressure wasn't holding...

he mentioned that he completely opened the pressure reducing valve which was placed right before the pump on the schematic...

[it was at this point which I started to question everything...]

the next thing he mentioned is that there wasn't enough pressure to keep the pump going so an external tank would need to be installed...

[crap... more parts and labor]

the pump would work fine once it was charged up, but the stopped working...

[dang... potentially broken pump]

... ... ...

so for the next week or so - I fiddled with it.

I was much to lazy to call him back and have to deal with more plumber stuff, so I tried to figure out the pump myself...

the pump instructions were not hard to follow... it just didn't mention stuff that I [eventually] figured out on my own...

the first thing that I didn't understand was why would the schematics call for a pressure reducing valve if it was supposed to remain wide open? didn't make sense...

then, why would the pump charge the pressure, run for a bit, and then stop when the pressure was low...

... ... ...

to make a long story short [too late]

I lowered the pressure via the pressure reducing valve and modified the pressure switch so that it turned on at a lower pressure...

I am assuming that the pump can sense how much pressure is coming in from the feed (water main) and can figure out how much pressure is being pumped through - because the pressure reducing valve was fully opened, too much water was being pulled in, so the pump would think there was enough pressure and then stop pumping...

I think that by lowering the pressure, it regulated how much water the pump was actually getting, so that it would keep a consistent flow of water from the main and therefore would not stop the pump because it could maintain a constant pressure, instead of a compression wave like pattern...

I'm not sure about the math behind it, but it seemed to work well while I was taking a shower today and when I was messing with the faucet...

I'll check with lorie tomorrow to make sure that it is working like I think...

if not - I'll have to tell her how to bypass the system...