gardenerDC
New Member
Quick background. I'm a homeowner with a large garden. We struck water when digging wells for our geothermal heating system. Checked the flow, it was good and had a pump installed. The well water (that pump works fine) gets pumped to an in-ground storage tank. In the storage tank is a booster pump which feeds our irrigation system. That pump is controlled by a Grundfos CU301. This is at least Year 3, perhaps 4--we've had nothing but problems. To be fair, not all of the problems can be attributed to the CU301, just most of them. The well company has been out three times this season, two of which were related to the CU301. For me, the biggest frustration is not being able to handle basic problems. For example, Saturday the system worked just fine. Sunday I noticed that the pump indicator was running continuously. The irrigation was off--no water was being called for. However even when I tried turning the irrigation on, it wouldn't deliver any water. Tried "rebooting" it by turning the power off for a few minutes. No luck. Today, rather than make another $200 service call I decided to troubleshoot it myself. I got out the manual, checked basic indicators outside the box then opened the box and to check the LED indicators. Everything looked right--greens in the right places, except I had a solid yellow on the Max speed. I'm guessing this has something to do with a dry run--it has shut off before from this. (As I said, the pump supplying water to the storage tank works fine but after a ground lightening strike fried something it wouldn't fill!). When I saw the indicator running constantly on Sunday I also noticed that the well pump was refilling the storage tank (after the small amount used on Saturday, it should have replenished the tank pretty quickly.) So this made me suspicious about a dry run. Then I read that the pump speeds up as power and pressure go down when the water gets low, which supports that suspicion perhaps? Maybe I didn't notice the dry run indicator was on the other day and it went off after my reboot? So what to do and how to fix it? As my husband now does regularly, head for the internet! Before I could even find my specific problem, I got sidetracked by the multitudes of posts about endless problems with the CU301 and the debate over VFD and CSV. I now understand that issue as much as any intelligent person can absorb in 30 minutes, which is to say the basics of the debate and opinions seem as polarized as this November's election! I did notice, however, that many of the posts were several years old--has there been progress on this front?
So I have an immediate question: Can I get my pump running again without a tech given the yellow Max light indicator and the continuous running and without the handheld R100 to "talk" to it? And I have a big picture question: Do we fall into this VFD/CSV debate and how do we determine what is the right approach for our system? I need a system that I know is going to work. And on those occasions when something does go wrong, I don't want it to be so opaque that I have no choice but to pick up the phone. When we leave 100 degree heat in DC for vacation, I have to know that the system isn't going to lock out which it has done time and again. Fortunately, when we installed the system originally, we also installed a city water valve. Sadly we've had to run it too often on city water because we simply couldn't be sure the well system would work. So much for "free" water...
So I have an immediate question: Can I get my pump running again without a tech given the yellow Max light indicator and the continuous running and without the handheld R100 to "talk" to it? And I have a big picture question: Do we fall into this VFD/CSV debate and how do we determine what is the right approach for our system? I need a system that I know is going to work. And on those occasions when something does go wrong, I don't want it to be so opaque that I have no choice but to pick up the phone. When we leave 100 degree heat in DC for vacation, I have to know that the system isn't going to lock out which it has done time and again. Fortunately, when we installed the system originally, we also installed a city water valve. Sadly we've had to run it too often on city water because we simply couldn't be sure the well system would work. So much for "free" water...