Creek and Well Water System

[sailawayrb]

So we have and use both water from a creek and from a well at our retirement homestead.  We use a hydraulic ram pump  to pump the water from the creek into underground concrete tanks that provide 10,000 gallons of storage capability.  We store all this water primarily for our fire suppression system and secondarily for our irrigation system.  We have fire hydrants on these tanks that allows attaching a gasoline powered water pump and fire hose with proper nozzles.  There is a 1 HP submersible pump in these tanks to pump this creek water into our domestic/irrigation water system.  There is a 1 HP submersible pump in our well to pump well water into our domestic/irrigation water system.

Normally, one would have a separate pump controller and a separate bladder tank for the creek and well water supply systems.  However, I decided to accomplish this with just a single pump controller and bladder tank.  I also wanted our domestic/irrigation water system to be able to toggle between each water source by just toggling a single switch to keep things as simple as possible for my wife.

So I used a power relay triggered by a standard wall switch to send the pump controller power to the desired water source  pump.  This wall switch also powers and un-powers an electrical outlet that two solenoid valves are plugged into.  One solenoid valve is normally open when not  powered.  The other solenoid valve is normally closed  when not powered.  These solenoid values are used to absolutely ensure that we can never back feed creek water into the well of vice versa.  There are also one-way check valves in these water lines too for redundancy.  We use the normally open solenoid valve for the creek water path as that is our preferred source of water.  If the creek gets low or goes dry, we can just flip the wall switch to use the well water.  We also occasionally use the well water just to exercise the pump and ensure that system is in good working order.

One has to be very careful anytime you have a valve between a pump and the pressure switch that turns it ON and shuts it OFF.  If the valve is closed and the pump gets turned ON, something is going to fail in a dramatic and perhaps painful way!  So to avoid this possible mistake and resulting calamity, I have pressure relief valves in the creek and well water lines prior to the manual and solenoid valves.  These pressure relief valves will prevent an over-pressure event and dump the water outside my shop.

We have a pretty extensive water filtration system too.  Well water has its own pre-filtration system to aerate the water and to remove some undesirable minerals from the well water before it reaches the shop filtration panel.  All the water (creek and well) gets sediment filtration, carbon filtration and UV light treatment.  The drinking water faucets have reverse osmosis and additional sediment filtration, carbon filtration and UV light treatment.

[sailawayrb]

Another photo

[sailawayrb]

Another photo