Home Improvement Asked by DAL on June 23, 2021
The city has pulled a water line down the road so I can now stop getting water delivered if I can figure out how. The problem is that my house is about 700ft up a 200ft hill. The city pressure goes from 70psi to 0psi about 1/2- 2/3 of the way up the hill. So I need a pressure boost to get to hilltop. Assume I can get power, any booster suggestions?
Given that static head is 0.433 PSI per vertical foot of head, it's no surprise that 70 PSI won't make it up more than 161 vertical feet.
An additional consideration if you have 700 feet of pipe will be the dynamic head related to flow in that pipe, though if you are only feeding your existing cistern that flow can be quite small (but sustained for long times.) Dynamic head is basically pipe friction, and depends on the flow rate, the size of the pipe and the type of the pipe. If you are hoping to disconnect your cistern and run directly on city water piped to your fixtures you will have much more of a concern with dynamic head loss in the pipe than if you run the pipe to fill your cistern and it can putter away at half a gallon per minute for hours at a time, while your current system provides pressure to the household fixtures at normal flow rates.
Shopping questions are off topic, so "what booster pump to buy" is both off topic and not something you've actually got enough information to even try to answer.
Answered by Ecnerwal on June 23, 2021
It's way too soon to be picking products. First you need a strategy.
I see five delivery problems here.
So there's no question in my mind that I'd put the booster pump as low as possible. That means both a water and electricity run for the full 700 feet, and that ain't chump change. So when reaching for Franklins, I first reach for a sharp pencil and the the old IBM "THINK" sign.
Honestly, you have to price it all ways and decide which features you want.
So suppose you want a cistern system that can recover 240 gallons/day (seems like a lot.) That's 10 gallons per hour. 10 gallons weighs x8.3= 83 pounds. If you are lifting 200 ft, that is 83x200=16600 foot-pounds per hour of energy. 1 KWH is 2655220 ft-lbs., so this will take you .00625 kilowatt-hours per hour, or 6.25 watts. That has "solar" written all over it - derate 80% for solar availability (lifting 50 GPH 20% of the time) and you're still at 31 watts. Easy peasy.
If we wanted a surge/demand system that could supply 10 GPM, that's 600 GPH, 996000 ft-lbs per hour, 375 watt-hours per hour, assuming 39% pump efficiency, that's about 4 amps at 240V. 12 AWG wire ($479) can do that, but that assumes no friction losses in the pipe, which assumes fat pipe. You'd have to balance the cost of fat pipe vs the cost of thicker wire to pump up thinner pipe. That balance is above my skill level. Normally I'm all about conduit, but in this case I'd direct-bury the electrical cable so it isn't stolen.
Answered by Harper - Reinstate Monica on June 23, 2021
Many years ago I built a house on top of a hill but the only water on the property was 300+ feet below the home. What we did to controll the cost was to install several large cisterns the well pumped up to the first largest cistern then the next had a smaller and the last up at the house had a final one with a very small pump due to the total distance of close to 700 feet it was cheaper to have a service for the well at the bottom of the hill that fed the 2nd station. The home pressure pump was powered by a small 110v pump and pressure tank. The bottom cistern and middle had gas powered backup pumps along with a gas generator at the house to power the top. All this may sound crazy but it was way cheaper than trying to run all the pumps from the house and since the area was in the boonies and prone to power outages they needed the redundancy to get a loan. You may be able to do similar using smaller pumps to fill cisterns that way cheaper pumps & less power required .
Answered by Ed Beal on June 23, 2021
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