Secrets Inside Your Well Pump. How Does A Deep Well Pump Work? FarmCraft101

so got another tear down here this is a deep well pump it just quit working so i called the well company and they came and replaced it with a new pump and left this with me so i figured heck i might as well tear it down and and see what happened see why it failed it might be interesting and who knows maybe i'd get really lucky and be able to fix it because the new pump costs $400 this is made by franklin electric three-quarter horsepower i already got a couple things some big hose clamps those are pretty beefy all right so this is the pump section and it just has a spline shaft down in there that mates with the output of the motor which is pretty heavy i have a feeling i'm going to open this up and find it's full of water so i just took out three screws i was thinking those were going to go all the way through but they don't it's wet in there no surprise see if this thing will spin nope that motor's seized up there's a little plug here and this threads it on there's a seal so that you can make your electrical connections from in the water to inside the pump without any issues with water penetration might have been our failure point right there that seal is cracked so i'm not sure what that is but it came out of right there it's got three electrical contacts on it probably a either i would think it would be a temperature sensor yeah there's no way i'm gonna be able to fix this thing but this motor seized up there's some water bubbling out it's actually a pretty heavy gauge piece of stainless steel high quality stainless steel too because this thing sat down in a well since about 1972 i wonder if i can drive this shaft out of here that at least would be something i could use in a future lathe project so i took this little thing apart and it is indeed a temperature sensor there's a little piece of metal right here that is either going to bend up with one temperature say cold or that way with hot and make a connection on the back side there's two leads right there so basically it would make those continuous now this third lead i'm a little confused by because it looks like there's a heat sink and a mosfet and since this is just hooked to motor windings i'm not sure how that fits in kind of curious about that maybe someone can explain that to me that's a stainless steel hose barb fitting that would probably cost i'm betting at least 10 bucks maybe even 15 bucks we have to cut this thing open that's kind of a bummer these were threaded in there was also a pin so probably if i had drilled it out i could have just unthreaded this and then this would be a solid steel tube that i could use for something but as it is i could even i could weld it i can still use it for sheet it's still useful so now we're down to the good part so this is water in that's just a screen mechanism remember the motor was bolted on here so this would be sealed so once water goes in here it's come through these all these little holes and then it's got access to this area the motor came up and turned this guy if you look here what we've got is an impeller as it turns it's throwing the water outward the water is in this little housing so it goes out hits the edge and then goes up into the next stage so it is it's a multi-stage impeller setup and i've got a nice hex shaft here i can use for something here if you look at the impeller a little closer the low pressure side would be here so it would go in here and it would go through these little if there's a hollow area underneath so the water gets drawn in there and then it comes out here as soon as it comes out it's getting thrown tight against the wall the other housing like that and therefore the pressure is rising so the water would want to go back down but of course there's a piece in the way so the water can't just come back into this chamber where it started so now we've got in this space above the impeller we've got a high pressure gallery essentially and the water would like to escape there and it has places to escape right here and they're directional too because of course everything's spinning so the water's spinning it's using the inertia of the water spinning around so if you look at this piece these little ports here communicate with the center again and just bring the the spinning water back to the middle to be drawn up by the next stage the next impeller so it then goes into these ports and out these ports and it gets pressurized again as this is spinning and here you can kind of see how it it can't go back down because even though it's high pressure here that's going to force this impeller against this and make a seal so the water would prefer to go up instead of trying to squeeze through that tiny little hole and again as it comes up into this gallery it's got exit ports so the path of least resistance is just to go to the next stage each time and then when it comes out the top it's however many psi now usually these pumps aren't pumping to 100 psi but they can some can go even higher but you know usually these pumps they charge your well system to you know 50-60 psi max so there you go it's just a multi-stage impeller pumping system this is our final gallery so the highest pressure is going into this chamber here and i cut that off so we can see the bottom of the check valve and how it functions and then i cut this off so we can see the top of it so basically the check valve is this rubber seal on top of this plastic piece and then this plastic piece sandwiches that rubber seal and it just screws together this thing had a spring on it like that and then the seal goes on and then it gets sandwiched there this is just for support to make it so that the seal doesn't pop off or deflect and the seal just forms between the rubber piece and this bore right here which is it looks like they've polished it to make it smooth when the pump is on the higher pressure side is here this gets pushed up the seal is moved out of the way and water comes through all these little chambers all these little holes so the water is going up through the middle and then out of these holes like this when the pump turns off the pressure is going to drop in this chamber and all the the column of water sitting on top of this is going to push down that's going to get forced down and it'll make a seal around there and the water is going to push that seal firmly against there and that's all it is there's your check valve the the pressure of the water itself is what pushes that seal in position and seals it up then when the pump turns on the next time the pressure is going to build underneath this is going to get forced up more water will come through until the pump turns off and then it shuts off so what did i get from this tear down i got some heavy gauge stainless steel that i can use for future projects unfortunately i'm not going to fool with this with all this epoxy on there trying to get that copper out of there is going to be a nightmare so that'll go to the recycler i got this 10 plus dollar stainless steel fitting that's something i'll certainly use in the future i'm going to keep this rubber seal i may find a use for that various nuts washers screws bolts these studs you know when you have a metal lathe something like this you can always make stuff out of that got a nice piece of 5-8 shafting i got a piece of hex shaft i got this tube had i taken more time and kept this as a solid tube it would have been more useful to me but uh but it's still something i can use and uh then the rest of the metal uh i will just recycle so yeah i actually got uh got a fair amount of value out of this plus i i got the knowledge of how the pump works which uh is really what i was after