Readers, you will have to forgive me, for I am going to take a short detour from my series of columns about clamp-on pitlesses. I recently had occasion to pull a pump that I had installed years ago and, not having a pump hoist available, did it the way we used to do it. Not being a young man anymore, I recruited a crew to help and the two people I got were my daughter Loretta and her husband Dennis. Now Loretta played softball in high school, and as the mother of three adult children still plays ladies’ ice hockey. Her husband, Dennis, was a center and linebacker on his high school football team and is built like most of these fellows are. He is also black belt in karate and has a strong upper body. Both of them have masters in business administration and neither of them has ever worked a day in the groundwater industry. They were, however, eager to see what was down inside that well. A picture of our crew is enclosed and you can see that I have the ear flaps down on my hard hat’s liner. It was a cool day but not bitter cold.
We pulled a 1-horsepower submersible hung on 100 feet of 1.25-inch schedule 80 drop pipe. This was in a 6-inch steel cased well of about 180 feet deep, finished in coarse gravel with 7 feet of stainless steel screen. This is an excellent well and, from indications on the drop pipe, the static level only draws down about 15 inches — yes, inches, not feet, when being pumped at approximately 25 gpm. This well was drilled in 1989 and gets a lot of use as the home it serves has an open-loop geothermal heat pump. The well was drilled when the house was new. The homeowner noticed some strong thumping noises on starting and stopping of the pump we pulled. That is usually a sign of check valve trouble, which proved to be right. In Michigan, water well codes do not allow a check valve outside the well casing, so a valve at the tank is illegal. As the pump we pulled was over 15 years old, I advised that we consider a new pump to replace the older unit although it was still pumping at good capacity.