Why You Should Have A Reverse Osmosis System

Why You Should Have A Reverse Osmosis System

The other day I was called out to San Antonio Texas for a problem with a booster pump leaking so I went out to take a look and saw the reason the pump was leaking.  What I found was that the pump had gotten hot trying to build pressure and made the PVC pipe shrink and swell that it began leaking where it screwed into the brass check valve.  So I fixed the leak and investigated further to see why the pump was getting hot while trying to build pressure.

Booster Pump Getting Hot

In order for a booster pump to work effectively it needs a great supply of water to draw from and a good pressure tank to build pressure in.  If you have a bad pressure tank then the pump cannot effectively build pressure and it will constantly run and get hotter than normal.  The other thing to note is if it does not have enough water supply to draw from then it will not be able to build pressure to either fill the pressure tank or to provide enough pressure to the house or even run the sprinklers.  So after further investigation I found that the water feeding the booster pump from the storage tank or cistern as some people call it did not have sufficient enough flow in order to correctly fill the booster pump on the suction side and allow the pump to run efficiently.  Now we found the problem and next we needed to find a solution.  So the first thing we did was check to see if there was water in the storage tank.  When I climbed up and looked inside you'll never guess what I found.  Why you need a reverse osmosis system

 

What's In Your Water

You know that credit card commercial that asks that question, "What's in your wallet?"  Well the difference in this case is not going to be as wonderful as the commercial.  As I opened the lid and looked inside the storage tank I found and interesting object floating on top of the water.  It took me a minute to figure out what I was looking at however I did figure it out and then removed the object.  Here is a picture of what I saw, see if you can figure out what you are looking at. 

Now the first image is a body part with the little leg and paw hanging down in the water. 

The second image is as it appears, it is the skull of a squirrel.  It got into a small hole in the top of the tank that was covered with a brick but a tree branch had moved it over time from the wind.  So the squirrel ended up inside the tank and was decomposing.  As I lifted the body part out the leg fell off and sank to the bottom of the tank and as I brought the rest of the body out you were able to smell it, and I will leave it at that.  So I asked the customer if they drank the water and they said yes.  So we put a large amount of chlorine in the tank to disinfect it.

The Rest of The Booster Pump Story

So in order to allow the booster pump to pressure up correctly we took the pipe off the suction side and blew air back into the storage tank and dislodged the object that was impeding the flow of water from the storage tank and into the booster pump.  After we blew air through the lines we checked the flow again and it filled the pipe like it should and the problem went away and we had another satisfied customer.

Notice the amount of water before and after that

is coming out of the pipe