2: How To Test Your Well Water Flow Rate

Clean Water Made Easy Podcast

Welcome back to Clean Water Made Easy Podcast! On this weeks episode, I talk all about well water flow rate and how easy it is for you to find out what the water flow rate is yourself. Today’s episode may be brief, but it covers a necessary topic. Enjoy! Topics: Why knowing your flow rate is important Figuring out how many gallons flow from your pump in one minute Important numbers to know The process of checking your flow rate Transcript: Hello, welcome back! Thanks for tuning in to the Clean Water Made Easy Podcast. My name is Gerry Bulfin. I’m a water treatment contractor and WQA certified Master Water Specialist. In this podcast series, I give out easy to follow tips and information all about well water, well water treatment systems, and how to improve quality of your well water. Importance of knowing your well water flow rate In this episode we will cover the simple steps you’re going to take to find out the flow rate of your well pump. What’s the importance of this?, you might wonder. Why should I find out what my well water flow rate is? Well, flow rate is how many gallons per minute your well pump can put out. It’s important and nice to know what your well pump flow rate is and how many gallons per minute it can put out and then check it again a year from now. It just takes minutes to do so it’s easy to find out. It’s good to know if there’s any changes. Why is it important to know your well water flow rate One of the most important reasons is those for sizing. Sizing your filters, sizing your home, add bathrooms to your home, you want to know how many gallons per minute you have available from your well pump, you might want to, if it’s possible, change the pump size to get more flow rate is not always possible but there are some wells where this is possible. Or you need water treatment so a lot of folks come to us, they want to size a filter system but first you need to know how many gallons per minute your well pump can put out, we can figure out what size of filter system works for you. Also a lot of folks want to know the well pump flow rate if they’re troubleshooting water pressure or low flow rate situation. I made a companion guide … to check your flow rate and also some pictures to and along with different information along with a simple calculator that will allow you to plugin and the 2 numbers that you need to quickly find out the flow rate. If you to get your free copy just text the word flow rate, one word to 44222 or go to www.cleanwaterstore.com/podcast and we’ll get that going to you free of charge. What is flow rate? So again, what is flow rate? Flow rate is simply defined as how many gallons in one minute your well pump can pump from your well. Now this is determined generally by the size of your well pump. So larger pumps will pump more gallons per minute, smaller pumps less, also how deep your well is, the pressure you have your pump is set at. But for these purposes, what we’re talking about is how many gallons can flow in 1 minute from the well into your pressure tank. That will give you an idea of what your well flow rate is. So for instance, if you can fill a 5-gallon bucket in 60 seconds then you can consider you have 5 gallons per minute coming from your well pump. If you could fill that same 5-gallon bucket in 30 seconds then you could say you have 10 gallons a minute. You may have a submersible pump that has a variable speed and a pressure that is constant pressure system. Meaning that maintains a single fixed pressure in. Measuring flow rate What we’re talking about in this episode is measuring the flow rate from a standard single speed well pump, not constant pressure systems. Most folks have this type and you can generally tell if you have that kind, you have usually a blue tank, of course different colors, but blue common color, and you have a pressure switch, and you have a pressure gauge.