Well Pump, Pressure Tank and Water System Service

Short cycling, and the cause is nearly always the pressure tank. A bladder tank holds a cushion of air that lets the system deliver water without the pump running; when the bladder fails, the tank fills with water, the cushion disappears, and the pump starts and stops on every small demand. Each start is the hardest moment in a motor's life, so short cycling is what actually destroys well pumps. Confirm it by tapping the tank and by checking whether water comes out of the air valve.

Air in the lines means the system is drawing something other than solid water. The common causes are a water level that has dropped below the pump intake so the pump is breaking suction, a leak on the suction side of a jet pump letting air in, a check valve that has failed and drains the column back overnight, or gas coming out of solution in the aquifer. The first of those is the one to take seriously, because a pump that keeps losing prime is a pump repeatedly running dry.

The gauge will tell you before anyone arrives. If the pump reaches its normal cut-out pressure but the interval between starts is only a few seconds, the tank has lost its air cushion. If the pump runs and the pressure climbs slowly or stalls short of cut-out, the problem is on the pump or the supply side. If it does not run at all, it is electrical, the switch, or the motor. Recording those readings yourself removes the first part of the visit.

The pressure side is plumbing work: the tank, the switch, the check valve, the line from the wellhead into the building and all the potable plumbing inside it. Constructing, repairing, deepening or plugging the well itself — casing, screen, grouting, and the pump set inside it — is a separately regulated specialty in Florida, permitted through the water management district and performed by a licensed water well contractor. The electrical supply and disconnect at the wellhead is a third trade again. If the diagnosis points to either, you are told, and the work is coordinated rather than improvised at the wellhead.

The first and largest variable is which side of the wellhead the fault is on, because anything inside the casing brings in a separately licensed well contractor and a water management district permit rather than a plumbing call. After that: the size and condition of the pressure tank, and whether the gauge, switch and fittings survive being disturbed. Whether the buried run from wellhead to house has to be opened up, and what is over it — sod, a driveway, a slab. Access at the equipment, which is often screened, enclosed or landscaped in. And whether the electrical supply needs correcting, which is another trade's scope.

It depends far more on how it has been run than on the calendar. A pump cycling constantly against a waterlogged tank fails early and predictably. A pump that has run dry, even once, may fail that day or months later. Sand in the water wears an impeller stack steadily. Voltage problems and a weak start capacitor on a three-wire system cook motors quietly over time. Correcting the cause is what makes a replacement last; dropping a new pump into an uncorrected system simply buys you the same failure again.

Usually not directly, but it is worth investigating rather than ignoring. Sand or grit appearing suddenly can mean a screen problem or a pump drawing from lower than it should. Rust and orange staining generally point at iron in the water. A rotten-egg smell is commonly hydrogen sulfide, which is an aquifer characteristic here rather than a mechanical fault, though it can also come from a water heater anode reacting with it. Cloudiness after heavy rain on a shallow well raises a surface-influence question that should be tested rather than guessed at.

Nothing runs. On a well property the pump is the utility, so an outage means no water at any fixture once the pressure tank has drawn down, which for normal household use is a matter of minutes. That is the argument for a generator circuit that includes the well — electrical contractor work, and worth arranging ahead of hurricane season rather than in the middle of it — or for stored water. A larger pressure tank buys a little more time and not very much of it.

They must not, and that is a regulated point rather than a preference. A private source and a public supply that can reach each other — even through a hose connection, a jumper, or an irrigation tie-in — is a cross-connection, and protecting against it is exactly what backflow prevention exists for. On a property with both, the well is generally restricted to irrigation and the two systems are kept physically separate. The assembly protecting the public supply carries its own periodic testing requirement, performed by a certified backflow tester.

For a private well used for drinking, testing is the only way to know what you are drinking, because nothing about it is monitored on your behalf the way a municipal supply is. Bacteria and nitrates are the usual baseline, and locally iron, hydrogen sulfide and hardness are what people notice first. Test after any work that opens the system, after a flood or a hurricane, and whenever taste, smell or appearance changes. Your county health department can tell you what to test for and who performs it.

Leave it off. An immediate trip means a genuine fault — most often a shorted motor, a damaged drop cable, water in a control box, or a seized pump — and repeatedly resetting it is how an electrical fault becomes a fire or a shock. That diagnosis is made with instruments rather than by trial: insulation resistance on the drop cable and motor, and running amperage against the nameplate. At the wellhead those readings belong to the electrical and well contractors, and what they show decides whether anything has to come out of the well at all.