Pumping

Pumping

The well pump is a solar-direct pump that will feed water slowly into a surface storage tank that will be 1700 gallons. The advantage of going with this type of system are that we are being gentle on the resource. The flow from the well pump is around 1.5 to 2 gallons per minute, which means the draw-down on the well is minimum. That means that even as the aquifer gets weaker, we should be able to continue to use it.
The alternative is putting a strong pump 180 feet down that will pressurize the house, and push 20 gallons per minute straight from the well. This draws very hard on the aquifer and is much more power consumptive.

We got the system from Sierra Solar Systems. They were quite helpful.

The system that we have consists of:

160 Watts of PV (2 Kyocera KC80 panels) wired in series for 24 V nominal.
Unisolar adjustable top-of-pole mount for panels.
Dankoff Solar pump controller LCB-8 (Linear Current Booster and switch control).
Sureflow 9300 pump. The pump is set at 180' below the top of the casing.

The panels are mounted on a 10 foot schedule 40 steel pipe, set 4 feet in the ground in 650 lb of concrete. The controller is mounted on the pole also.

The photos below show some of the steps to getting it all in. There's something kind of neat about having solar pannels withing feet of a power pole. :-)

Larry milling the brackets for the controller
Pole installed and set in concrete.

Panels installed. (easy with just 2 people).
First water flowing!

Voltage produced by panels under load December 5, 2002.
Volts out to pump, under load, December 5, 2002.

One more picture of water flowing, about 1.5 gallons per minute.
Close-up of water flow.

Larry milling the brackets for the controller	Pole installed and set in concrete.
Panels installed. (easy with just 2 people).	First water flowing!
Voltage produced by panels under load December 5, 2002.	Volts out to pump, under load, December 5, 2002.
One more picture of water flowing, about 1.5 gallons per minute.	Close-up of water flow.