Thursday, October 9, 2014

Help Wanted-Part Two





This is getting ridiculous.  Almost three weeks in the making. Jockey pump constantly recycling and when it cannot keep up a large pump kicks on creating the spikes seen in the picture above.  Impatiently waiting for the water to show itself or wishing for major system "blow" out just so we could potentially get to the root of our problem is getting old.

The short bar graph seen on the left happened with a repair made to an obvious small leak for the club house feed just off in the ninth rough.  Frustrated, I knew our leak had yet to be found.

I had only one more card to play.  For the past couple of weeks, I noticed the water level in the pond was above the painted hazard lines in places.  This would be expected with all our recent rains but this was unusually full in my mind.  There was only on more thing to try, take the mothballed #8 pump house offline.  This also shuts off the water to the entire eight hole.  Eureka we found it! Notice the almost straight line with little pressure loss.  That's a normal graph of system irrigation water pressure.  Very few pump starts per hour.  Water is bypassing both the pump check valve and inlet pipe foot valve and slowly filling the pond.  This pump house was constructed in 1964 and hasn't been used since 1982.  That makes those fittings 50 years old!  Thank God!  Now I don't have to worry that the leak is under the parking lot! _Mk