The county put city water and sewers in a few years ago at my other place. I still have pumps that I used for well water that I've tried using to pump lake water to water the gardens and lawns. My well is not able to supply more than a trickle anymore, a lot of wells here have gone dry, the lake is down two to three feet over the past ten years, that might be the cause.
I split-off all the outside faucets to a separate system. At present, I have 100' of 1.25" line going out into the lake with a well point on the end and it's buried about 2'into the sand. It's clogged again! I've tried three different well points, this one is the finest and has worked the best, almost 6 weeks. I've tried a floating pick-up and a large seine box I made. Nothing has worked well, the lake gets violent and stirs up a lot of stuff, a lot of very fine stuff. None of my neighbors have had any great luck either. Any ideas? (Great year for Walleye so far!)
On Tuesday, June 26, 2012 6:39:17 PM UTC-4, Tom Gardner wrote: . I've tried a floating pick-up and a large
Not a great idea, but ................
How about using two pumps. One a pump not sensitive to trash and sand. Use it to pump water into a settling tank/pond, And another pump to get good pressure for running sprinklers.
it to pump water into a settling tank/pond, And another pump to get good pressure for running sprinklers.
I'm thinking of a way to back-flush a big tank. The pump will supposedly take 20% sand and has a pressure tank that fills up with sand. It's not too bad to blow the sand out with the pump running and the c*ck open but it's only 20 gal and fills with sand in a matter of hours with only a coarse filter on the intake. The tank would have to be a LOT bigger but might work. I don't have room for a pond, unfortunately.
Along that line, maybe the trash pump dumps the water on a sloping filter, such as screening and landscape cloth, over a tub that you pump clean(er) water from.
How about leaving your fine filter on the lake intake line and back flushing it periodically? Maybe 2 intake lines and alternate between them and flush the idle line? Art
I'll try that this weekend by running a hose of city water to the pump and back-flush the lake line. If that blows the well point clean(er) it would be simple to do permanently or even automate it.
That's a good one but I still need an input that is exposed to at least some water. Lake Erie is vicious! The bottom out there moves, grows, goes away. I've had my input line get ripped out in a storm and it was buried the day before.
The local lake folks have a similar problem. One now uses a filter like mine to deal with it.
His suction pipe has a simple sock filter on it. This feeds into an electric semi trash pump. Out of this pump it hits the water system. The system starts with a modified pool filter with rare earth in it. This gets most of the trash and larger stuff out. Out of this it goes into a
250 gallon stock tank for UV treatment. This tank acts like a settling tank as well. Next step is through the house pump with a split system, Toilets and outdoor split off while potable water heads through a chlorine injector and three stage filter unit with the last stage being activated charcoal.
Same thing locally on the 'eyes. Been pulling them out of just about anything deeper than 5 FOW. Bass is a bit slow so far but the LL Salmon and L trout seem to be hitting good.
Our lake system was on a much smaller lake, so perhaps less violent - Best I recall (been a few decades since the camp sold) the intake was a normal foot valve tied to a few cinder blocks to hold it above the bottom (rolled out every spring and up every fall.) Drinking water was from a spring, via dipper.
If the lake violence is more about stirring up fine silt than about tearing up your intake pipe setup, divide and conquer - I was just looking into standpipe systems (I'd have to build the pond or cistern for that first, here) after a particularly bad fire near us where the FD had to drag water 2/3rds of a mile (and by the time they set up for that, smoking rubble was the result, of course) and a suggestion for silty conditions was to put a cross or two on the end of the pipe with 3 or 5 large barrel filters pointing up, rather than one laying sideways.
If the lake is tearing up your in-lake part, try a super-coarse screen at the intake (above sand) into a "spin down filter" (vortex+screen) after the pump (the one I have the seals don't seal if it's sucked on, so I don't think it can work in the suction side unless you get one that seals differently) and figure on replacing pump parts from time to time.
A third approach would be to bury the point deeper (use the sand as a sand filter) and/or (since you have multiple points now, it sounds like) try the divide and conquer method going down into the sand rather than up into the water. Keep the points perhaps 10 (or more) feet from each other and see if you can (perhaps by setting the pump up to temporarily draw raw water from close to shore and blow it out your intake pipe, or the usual intake pipe and a long garden hose) jet them in 7-10 feet or so deep, so they are each using a large area of sand as their "filter."
To simplify life even further (at the cost of some one-time complexity), remove the foot valves from the well point(s) before installing it (them), arranging a single check valve somewhere more accessible but below water level, and set up (tees and valves to change the pump intake & go around the check valve) so that you can reverse flow - pumping a tank or watering trough full of clean(-ish) water back through the well point(s) to backflush the sand filter (lake bottom) without having to dig them back up. Which might work just fine with the one point and 2 feet deep in the sand, for that matter, though I'm guessing deeper will still be better, since it makes a larger "sand filter" unless you run out of sand and hit mud.
What seems to be the best walleye bait for you? We use "Slayers": Hook with night crawler, small colored spinner, 3' line, @ 3/8 oz split shot. slow retrieve-pause-slow retrieve.
Jetting the point in is brilliant! Deeper would certainly be better. I'd have to go out another 100' to use a semi-permanent intake held off the bottom. I do have to be careful of swimmers and all the small watercraft that the locals use. I also have to make sure that it's all still cheaper than city water/sewer...that they sell for a fortune.
I've been getting them on clown and watermelon sonars and on purple/black 1/4oz jigs. Have seen a few taken on crawler harnesses as well. I know folks are trolling on Erie for them with harnesses and having luck.
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