How A Small Water System Works
When you turn on the tap or faucet in your home, you expect to see and hear water. Maybe you know where the water comes from, but most of you have probably never given it much thought.
The other morning, I turned on the faucet in the bathroom, only to see and hear nothing. So I hollered to my wife and she said she hadn't touched anything. I said, "I figured that, but have you heard anything." She said she hadn't. That afternoon, she showed me a notice she found the day before on our door handle. On it was written that the water department would be fixing a leak in our area and the water may be shut off for a time in the morning. So I told her that was what I was talking about when the water was off. "When?" she replied.
This little water association serves nine members, because of this, we are not required to maintain the same type of facilities and records as those associations or districts serving a larger body of people. However, we use the rules for larger facilities as a guide for our operations because we want to offer the best service and safest water possible.
The little building you saw in the last photo is our pump house. It is built over a ten thousand gallon concrete water tank. This makes it very compact and convenient when performing maintenance operations.
The wellhead is about fifty feet away from the building. We drilled five hundred fifty feet for water. We kept drilling for another eighty feet after we hit water to give head in the casing and to allow for fluctuations within the aquifer. The pipe shown in the photo comes from the wellhead and leads to the reservoir tank. Looks can be deceiving: although the pipe is entering the tank, it does not deposit at this point.
Looking through this hatch, you see the pipe entering the reservoir and turning to the right. From here it comes up through the top of the tank, and depending upon which way the valves are opened and closed, we can flush the water outside the building or direct it through the meter and back into the tank. We measure the water that enters the tank just in case the State wants to know and it indicates to us whether everything is operating normally or if we may have a leak down the line.
If you look through the hatch again, you will see a series of floats. These floats control switches that tell the pump in the wellhead when to operate and when to shut off. This prevents water from continually filling the tank, even after it is full, and it prevents pump burn-out. Using the floats as controllers for the switches, they also instruct the alarm to sound if the water rises too high or remains too low. There is a manual override to turn the alarm off.
Now we are looking back at the hatch and the surrounding equipment. The pipe with the valves and the meter we talked about is on the right. The very large white poly pipe, to the right, is for the fire department to lower their pumps to extract for the fire hoses. These pumps will extract water at a rate of two-hundred fifty gallons per minute.
On the upper right are shelves where we keep records of testing and special equipment. Some of our equipment includes a firehose for flushing the water away from the building. Usually, however, when we flush, we are testing for samples and do not need to use the hose. We also keep a pressure tester on hand for checking members' pressure, if ever there is a complaint. And, we always keep a spare water meter on hand - we learned that from experience. We also learned from experience to keep a spare quartz heater on hand, just in case any or both of the wall heaters break down.
To the left are the electrical control boxes and manual overrides. The system is automated. We use the manual overrides when testing the system. That long stick on the very left is a wrench for the two gate valves that control the lines. It is long because the valves are deep to prevent freezing in Winter.
These are the pumps that run the system. They alternate in cycle to extend the life of both pumps. The pressure tanks are beyond the pumps (you can see the base of the units in this photo). These units help maintain pressure on the system while the pumps are not in operation. There are two reasons you do not want the pumps running full-time, even if cycling consecutively: The first is obvious, the pipes would eventually burst with no controls on the pressure; and secondly, the pumps would wear out quickly.
This is a better photo of the pressure tanks. These tanks have bladders in them which put pressure on the water system piping. This solves the problem of what to do when the pumps are not running. In the background, you will notice two small control boxes. These boxes are pressure controls. The make sure the pumps operate when the pressure in the lines drops to forty PSI and shut off when the pressure reaches sixty PSI.
The rest of the system consists of approximately two thousand feet of four-inch C900 piping, two gate valves to segregate by section and nine water meter set-ups with basins, corps and saddles. When reading meters, I find using my ATV to be a great tool. It is not as bulky as my truck and faster than walking.
Now that you have a basic understanding how a small water system works, you might have a greater appreciation for what comes out of the tap when you turn on the faucet -- even if you live in the big city.