The house pump was there when we moved in, nearly ten years ago. It hasn't been removed or serviced in that time. It delivers water to the sheep and cattle troughs, and all the water required inside the house....drinking water, dishwasher, washing machine, showers....it must turn on and off hundreds of times a day. When we have a leak the pump works even harder.

So, no complaints from me. Its been reliable and worked consistently. But this week it just stopped. It was making an odd humming noise, but not pushing any water through. Not that long ago the river pump did something similar. I thought it was full of sand, and pulled it apart to clean it out. Correct diagnosis. But when I went to put it back together it didn't want to fit. I'm no technician, so I lay things out in order to make it easier to put them back in sequence, but that wasn't it. In the end O took it all in to the pump repair place in a box. They were pretty irritated with my inept handiwork.

So this time, even though I was pretty sure it was a blown capacitor, I took the pump in to the repair place not a screw loose. I did notice a plastic sleeve that sat around the pump was cracked. It didn't seem important, but I pointed it out when I took it in and said I would be happy to get that replaced.

So, no water at home. But how's this.....sitting in the shed, waiting for its day of glory, was a spare pump. My brother gave it to me a couple of years ago, and its sat there waiting. Ten years ago this would have taken me a week, but in ( I am not joking) 20 minutes I had the standby pump plumbed in and we were online again. Fantastic.

I went inside, went to get a drink of water....and the pump died.

From there we descended into madness. It took days to diagnose and resolve the issue. What was going on was that if I turned on a high volume tap, like the cattle trough, or the tap and the end of the house, water flowed freely. All the taps inside worked fine. But if I was inside and just turned on, say, the kitchen sink tap, nothing. No water. The pump would only respond to a high volume request. Dishwasher failed, clothes washing out.....that night Sylvia wanted to use the shower and in the end I went outside, turned on the the high volume tap and ran it until the shower was finished.

At that point it seemed like we were dealing with a blockage in the small pipes inside. The kitchen sink, for example, is a mixer tap. Into the tap are two woven flexi water pipes, but ludicrously small diameter pipes...maybe 5mm. The same sort of gunge that blocks my river pump pipes could be building up in the house pipes. After all, we use tank water and there is a fair bit of leaf litter makes its way into the tank over time. And while I was replacing the pump I could see the pipes had a coat of tank gunge built up.

So I went down a path of seeing whether I could disturb a pipe blockage. Long story. Short version is I ran a hose into the house and attached it to the internal pipe that the mixer tap used. The idea being to flush back down the pipe any accumulated gunk. I opened the high volume tap at the end of the house, and attached the hose directly to the pump. Turned it on, then went back into the house to see what happened.

Its a two man job really. Someone should have been inside watching the hose when I turned it on. Of course it burst, and in the 45 seconds it took me to get to the kitchen from the pump quite a lot of water had sprayed around the kitchen, at high pressure.

Ho hum. Mopped up, fixed it all up and eventually was convinced there was no blockage. Wild goose chase.

The second diagnostic wild goose chase was that when the pump failed I went and checked the house fuse box. Aha! A fuse labelled "Septic" has tripped. The septic system has an overflow holding tank. When the tank fills it is pumped out to an evaporation line. With the fuse tripped that wouldn't happen. I leapt to the conclusion that the pump issue was electrical, and wasted half a day on diagnostics trying to prove that the house pump was tripping the fuse. It wasn't, it turns out the septic system had its own problems that no one had noticed. I find this hard to believe but here goes...the septic system has an alarm. If the overflow tank gets too full the alarm sounds, to prevent a greywater overflow. But the alarm and the pump share the same fuse. So when the septic pump fails, the alarm system doesn't work because...the fuse is off. Honestly, who thinks that is a useful implementation?

Anyway, the failed septic pump was very close to being an environmental issue. So I spent a day sorting that out, eventually hauling the bilge pump out, cleaning it all off and testing it in a barrel. All worked fine,. I ended up putting it all back together and it worked fine, crisis averted. ( I should say though, two weeks later, I randomly checked the fuse box today for no reason...and the septic pump fuse is blown again. Doh!)

Out of all of that I tested the house pump independently of the septic system. I also ran both pumps using different electrical PowerPoints. It clearly wasn't the sockets the pumps use.
The pumps themselves are unrelated, they did NOT share a fuse or wiring. Whatever was going on was not a single issue, it was two pumps with separate issues.

Back to the house pump. Not an electrical issue. Not a blocked pipe issue. In the end I figured I wasn't going to solve it myself. ( This is one of those issues where you wouldn't call a plumber. A plumber would tinker with it for five minutes, turn on the high volume tap and run it for thirty seconds, then drive off as the house tap shut down.) I went into Wangaratta and presented my case at the pump shop. He scratched his head, no idea why the pump would service high pressure and not low pressure. In the end the only option was to replace the pump pressure controller. I could tell he wasn't convinced, but didn't have any other ideas.

And that was what it was. Faulty electronic controller, when replaced, it all worked perfectly.

Only took me five days.

Postscript: With the pump I took in for repair....the plastic sleeve on the outside that had cracked actually held it all together. Once the sleeve cracked the internals moved around, shredding themselves. Fixable, but parts and rebuild more expensive than buying a new pump.

Postscript 2: This is a long post about pumps. It could be a lot longer, the story is much more complicated but I shortened it to male it more readable. In doing that I missed out saying how much my brother helped me with this, including supplying pumps and pump fittings on very short notice.