Pumps suck!

This doesn’t mean pumps are bad, it means pumps can’t lift up water. Suction is vacuum pull and can only pull in close by water. At start up a pump pulls water down then stops when a well’s counterbalance catches up with pumping rate. Scale and clogging, along with age without cleaning reduces a wells deep horizontal flow and a pump replaces it with sucked down water. This may seem insignificant, but it is the shift from deep to shallow water that is responsible for almost all well problems and damage. Today pumping a larger water volume out of wells makes it necessary for a periodic well camera check-up to make sure an efficient pump is not sucking the life out of a well.

EROSION DAMAGE

Scale is often thought of as a nuisance because it is usually found deep and does not affect water pumping. The major damage from scale is not from the scale itself, it is from erosion where the scale is light or nonexistent. This is because scale normally blocks deep water from entering a well and this increases water speed in areas that remain open. It is faster moving water at higher pressure that wears out perforations, erodes holes, and increases casing deterioration.

SUCTION DAMAGE

Clogging, like scale does not usually affect pumping. You cannot see clogging unless it is sticking through perforations. What clogging does is narrow down water inflow, usually to a very small area adjacent to a pump’s intake. A pump keeps this area open by pulling the well’s full water volume through a small area, but it is pump sucking in water that damages a well. The damage from clogging almost always ends up as sucked in perforations or screen, a break or out of round casing. The damage is almost always found close to where a pump was set.

COMPRESSION DAMAGE

There is a constant force pulling down outside a well as water is extracted out of the ground, even more in a scaled over clogged well. Over the course of time hydraulic force squeeze’s formation down. This squeezing down often pulls the casing down with it and because there is no place to go the casing telescopes together. It starts out as bends, buckles and broken joints that grow progressively larger as you descend down a well.  In perforated and screened areas breaks tend to overlap, push into each other and often occur in bends or offsets.

LOOKING AHEAD

Pumping more water, out of more wells, places a larger workload on all the wells sharing the same aquifer. A 10 GPM well may never see damage before it runs out of water, but the deep high volume wells today are seeing more damage, sand pumping, drawing down contaminants and fail sooner than they did in the past. The choice is slow down water pumping or camera a well every few years to find damage and repair a well before damage escalates out of control. Repairing damage before it becomes a pumping problem is not only smart; it keeps production up and increases a well’s longevity.