Well water, pressure tanks and issues

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Nick10

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Hi Guys,

I've got a interesting problem with our well water supply setup and hope some of you might be able to guide me in the right direction.

Some info:
-New well, 500 ft deep, produces 5-8 gpm, lots of reserve
-Very bad colour, iron and turbidity which required alum injection + media and carbon filters. Filtration system now works great and don't want to mess with it now as it took so much work to get perfect.
-Setup is well water to 10 gal pressure tank w/switch to large contact tank with alum injection, valve to choked flow to 3gpm, then media filter, carbon filter then to house.

Problem is for the filtration system to flocculate and operate properly, max flow rate through the system is about 3 gpm, not enough for our family house. More than a couple faucets and something starts to give.

From some research online, seems like the couple options are:

1) Open tank after last filter, with float switches or similar to operate well pump. Secondary pump required after open tank to pump to house. This seems simple enough in principle but would require some electrics and safeties to prevent overflow and so on.

2) Very large pressure tank after last filter to provide some reserve water capacity with some pressure behind it. Presume first small pressure tank and switch would still operate well pump. Not sure how well this would work, but would prefer it to option 1) as it seems there is less that could go wrong, less moving parts.

Your thoughts on the above, or possibly other options i should consider would be appreciated.

Thanks
Nick
 
The cistern is the best idea. I have all the goodies to do what your talking about. I do this a lot for people with low flow wells. Never before for water as nasty as yours seems to be. Do you have the numbers on your water? Like TDH, Iron, Hardness, Sulfur etc?

I'm sending a system out today which consists of a float switch, 24 volt transformer, solenoid valve and submersible pump.
 
I don't think you would be happy with a large pressure tank after the filter. With a 50/60 pressure switch setting the tank will drain to 50 before the pump starts. At that time the pump will be adding 3 GPM while anything over that comes out of the tank as the pressure continues to decrease to maybe 30 PSI. Yet this will only give you about 20 gallons extra for each use.

3 GPM is actually 4,320 gallons per day. If you had a cistern type storage tank with 1,000 or 1,500 gallons in it, a separate booster pump could supply as much GPM as you need at good pressure. Even a 100 gallons cistern tank would deliver as much as 5 large pressure tanks. And yes you would need some electric and plumbing to add the extra pump. But a Pside-Kick kit with a CSV and a 4.5 gallon size pressure tank would be all you would need. You could either use a jet pump drawing from the storage tank or a submersible laying in the storage tank.

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