How to prove to my neighbor he burned out the well pump?

[DaveIsD]

Ugh,

So Monday my neighbor calls me (its my second home) and says he thinks the pump breaker is tripped at my house. So I remotely open the door but then he said it wasn't the breaker.

So I start remotely looking at the power draw of the pump and I can see it is cycling on and off and I text him and tell him.

SO he tells me he is having his house pressure washed - I don't think this is a good idea and tell him the pump is cycling off and on. He says they are almost done.

So surprise surprise the pump failed today. He calls and says it will be 4k - we have another well we can connect to - I say lets just connect to that. He goes ahead and replaces the pump anyway without my approval

I have data that shows the pump was cycling off and on rapidly during the pressure washing (attached) for about 5-6 hours... Then again for a few hours the next day.

(well is on my property and I pay for the power) - I think if you broke it you should pay for it.

You can actually see the pump oscillating off and on pretty well. He say the motor was hit by a surge or lightning. I say the motor was burned out by the constant water demand/off and on.

Here everything is normal power draw wise for a whole month until the pressure washing day.

 

[Valveman]

Get you hands on the old pump/motor. It is usually easy to tell if lightning hit it. You can also see signs of too much cycling. Is that last chart the number of cycles? Do you know how many times per day it cycled? A day or two of normal cycling should not have took out the pump. But if your tank is bad or too small and you don't have a Cycle Stop Valve then rapid cycling can take out a pump in a short time like that.

 

[Sponsor]

 

[DaveIsD]

As far as I can count it cycled on and off about 170 times in a 5 hour period. At least once ever other minute sometimes more than once a minute.

I think he had two pressure washers going at the same time.

Clues are

1. He changed the filter toward the end of first day of pressure washing (I assume it had stopped supplying good water pressure and was plugged up with sediment)
2. Power consumption of the pump has always been steady at about 2k watts. During the pressure washing it all of a sudden went up to almost 4k watts and that is were it stayed for the next few days (there was more pressure washing the next day) until it went up to 6k watts
3. We haven't had any storms for several weeks.
4. On the 19th, 20th the well used more electricity than it did for the entire year previously



It is a relatively deep well for the area at 800 feet - pressure tank is under 30 gallons I believe - clearly something was going on because he though the breaker tripped and he changed the filter after they had been pressure washing for 2-3 hours (I am guessing it was plugged up with sediment)

Possible he ran the well dry as well.

 

[Valveman]

When working properly a 30 gallon tank holds about 8 gallons of water. This means your 800' deep well pump should be putting out about 8 GPM, and the pump should never run less than 1 minute. But "normal" cycling will bend the tank diaphragm up and down until it breaks like bending a wire back and forth. When the diaphragm is bad the air gets out and the pump cycles much faster. A couple of days of pressure washing with a bad tank can cycle the pump to death. But running the well dry can also burn up the pump. You could probably tell which way caused the failure by inspecting the old pump/motor. Either way the pressure washing was the cause of failure, but it probably would have happened in a few months anyway because the tank is bad.

 

[Reach4]

2. Power consumption of the pump has always been steady at about 2k watts. During the pressure washing it all of a sudden went up to almost 4k watts and that is were it stayed for the next few days (there was more pressure washing the next day) until it went up to 6k watts

That would seem to say that the pump went from drawing 8 or so amps to 25 or so amps. Instead I suspect that your numbers are kwh per day, or something. I tried to follow your graphs, but did not really succeed.

I have data that shows the pump was cycling off and on rapidly during the pressure washing (attached) for about 5-6 hours... Then again for a few hours the next day.

How rapidly? Every 4 minutes? Every 30 seconds? Worst case is that somebody consumes water at half of the rate of what the pump delivers. Yet I really doubt that you have a good case to say that by his using 4 gpm for 20 hours, that he should bear the total cost of a failure.

So surprise surprise the pump failed today. He calls and says it will be 4k - we have another well we can connect to - I say lets just connect to that. He goes ahead and replaces the pump anyway without my approval

I presume you have some contract to cover decisions and costs.

Can you amend the contract? What if he decides to irrigate his land?

 

[Banjo Bud]

Pressure washers don’t use much water.

 

[Valveman]

Pressure washers don’t use much water.

Actually, using small amounts of water for long periods of time is what causes pump cycling and destroys a lot of pumps. I have heard this for 50 years. "I couldn't have hurt my pump as I was just using a little bit of water." Using a little bit of water without having a CSV is the worst thing you can do to a pump as it will cycle itself to death. Without a CSV using a lot of water to keep the pump from cycling is the only way to make the pump last.

 

[Banjo Bud]

I guess I don’t understand that. If the tank is 30 gallons, holds 8 gallons, and I use 1/3 gallon per minute, the pump would only run once every 24 minutes. I have a CSV and believe in them but I don’t fully understand what you’re saying here.

 

[Valveman]

At 1/3rd of a GPM you would be correct. However, most pressure washers use 1.5 to 3.0 GPM, which would cause a lot of cycling with just 8 gallons in a tank. At 3 GPM that would be a cycle about every 3-4 minutes, which would be 15 times an hour, or 360 cycles per day. Compare 360 to just one cycle when using a CSV and it makes a lot of difference on how long a pump will last.