Stupid Water Well

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] Dear QW: Thank you for your latest response. You may not have run across this, but installations using a DOLE FLOW CONTROL VALVE are routine on many domestic wells that are drilled in low-production strata. The DOLE has a deformable rubber washer in it; which resists plugging about as well as anything that you could install; is non-adjustable and therefore customer proof; and inexpensive. Using that, and a low cut-off safety pressure switch is the standard arrangement for low production domestic wells. Additionally, the DOLE will do the "thinking" for the user and will prevent pump damage from "upthrust" if he runs with an open discharge. Subs are especially vulnerable to damage by running open discharge; can sustain motor damage from electrical overload, and are almost always, as mentioned, mechanically damaged by impeller shaft upthrust. Since the motor and the thrust bearings are on the bottom of the impeller shaft, only the little "upthrust button" is available to take shaft end thrust in the upward direction. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] It MAY be that the poster's well is a "silter" and not much can be done except to re-develop it with a compressed air jet. Usually, once is enough to get rid of the loose material unless there is one heck of a void in the gravel pack. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Bird, My first computer was a used Trash 80 model one level two 16k computer. It was a B&W monitor, keyboard (CPU), and a Radio Shack mono cassette for magnetic storage. I paid a ham radio acquaintance $400 for it ($800 new) and bought a set of tapes that ran on the computer and taught you to program in the BASIC language. I wrote a couple simple SPACE INVADER type games and then wrote a program to take celestial navigation data and compute your fix. I was living on a salilboat and thought that was neat stuff. This got be hooked on computers and went I back to school at nights and got a BS in computer sci and then a masters in software engineering, also at night while working full time. Simultaneous full time college and full time employment kept me busy, off the streets, out of bars, and away from strange women.

I recall the CoCo (Color Computer) also. A PhD psychologist hired a friend of mine and I to write him a software to use in self improvement seminars. A very capable box indeed but the BASIC compiler for it was flawed. I was writing graphcs routines to display pie charts and the compiled version would put out one pixel of the circumference of a circle and crash. IT ran OK in interpreted BASIC but was too slow. We had to change computers which was a hassle as a computer was given to each student in the seminar (to keep) as part of the fee.

Exciting days in computing... I recall the first IBM PC units which ran at 4.77 MHz, had single sided single density 5 1/4 inch floppy diskettes with 360K storage, NO HARD DRIVE, and required a system disk in the slot at power up to boot or else it would boot in ROM BASIC. You know, I could never out type WordStar on one of those "SLOW" machines. Now you have Microsoft Word on a CPU running over 1 Gig and it takes longer to load and do things than way back in WordStar days. Oh well...

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Bird]

Pat, even though I've been "using" computers a long time, I'm still pretty much a computer dummy. Of course when I started, I had good friends living across the alley behind us who were both computer programmers. He was a bank vice president and she worked for EDS. At one time, he resigned from the bank for awhile and wrote banking programs at home on a model III TRS 80. He sold the programs to a few banks, but the bank in Dallas finally talked him into coming back. He did teach me a bit about BASIC programming.

When I went to the FBI National Academy at Quantico in '86, I went on my Honda Aspencade, pulling a trailer behind it, and took my model IV and daisy wheel printer. Like you said, 360k single side floppy, no hard drive. I can't even remember what word processor I was using, but I got it from Radio Shack.

When I got to Quantico, I found that the FBI Academy had a room set up with 31 computer stations, but only two had printers. There was an employee there during the day on weekdays who could help anyone in my group who didn't know how to use those computers, but they were available at night and on weekends, too. Many of the guys had never used a computer, but there was a lot of paperwork that made a word processor almost a necessity.

We were split up into groups of 50, and when they found that I used a word processor, I got assigned as the contact for anyone with questions at night or weekends. And the Academy used WordStar, which I'd never seen. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] So I got in there with the manual and learned to use it. Of course everyone was told to use any computer, save their work to a floppy, then use the floppy in one of the computers hooked to a printer when they were ready to print it. I really felt sorry for the guys who did long papers, then shut everything down without saving it to a floppy and had to start over. [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img] And several guys were working on those computers the night we had a power outage for a couple of hours during a thunderstorm. Needless to say, they were a bit upset, too. [img]/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img]

[GaryQWA]

Dave, thank you for the reply. I'm very familiar with Dole flow controls. I've been using them for various water treatment equipment for 19 years; all softeners and regenerated or backwashed filters have one. Along with UV lights. Most are internal but the external type is used on our large heavy mineral filters and large UV lights. Here we don't use them in wells and in your first reply mentioning a flow control, it didn't sound to me that you were describing a washer type Dole flow control.

We do use low pressure safety cut off switches for low producing wells. And yes I understand thrust bearings etc.. So it looks as if we have two different ways to treat the cause of this problem, we simply seem to disagree as to what that cause is. [img]/forums/images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

Gary
Quality Water Associates

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] Yes, I recall those same flow controls used on the Bruner filters that we installed for so many of the farms on the West Side of the San Joaquin Valley of California. When the San Luis Canal (California Aqueduct) was filled with water in 1970, there was a big rush to get hooked up to the canal for domestic water since the underground water was next to un-drinkable. Some of the farms had twenty to thirty homes on them so the domestic water treatment systems were fairly good sized, that, plus the tractor drivers all got home at the same time covered with dirt and usually hit the shower immediately so there was a huge "shock load" that required lots of treated water storage. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] Some of the systems used gas chlorine, some were liquid. That San Luis water was high bicarbonate, but very user friendly, and easy to treat. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Bird, Did you ever suspect that CTRL A, CTRL S, CTRL D, etc. that repetitively put your fingers into contorted positions to use shortcut commands for moving the cursor a word left, letter left, letter right etc on WordStar could be responsible for some of your carpal tunnel problems?

Ahh, life before autosave and recover capabilities in word processors... I used WordStar to prepare the minutes of board of director meetings when I was secretary on the board of directors at our yacht club. I was so paranoid about losing a file that I would disengage the latch on the floppy drive to inhibit it from writing in case of a power failure as it might spritz junk into the file and ruin it. When I wanted to save the file to diskette (about every 5 minutes) I would twist the latch and then hit save. SO... I reached up and twisted the latch to allow the disk to read/write and as I was giving the ommand to save the file... the power went out and corrupted the file! It seems some bozos were working on the electricity on the dock and never considered checking to see if anyone cared about a shut down. There were loud speakers for paging!!!!

And now for a chuckle... I was in the computer lab one day when this foreign student asked me for help. It seems he put his floppy disk in and tried to boot the IBM PC but it kept coming up in ROM BASIC not DOS. Seems he was CAREFULLY holding the diskette by the media, yeah his fingers were toucing where the atual magnetic diskette was exposed through the holes in the cover and shoving the diskette into the drive slot backwards! I told him that if when he turned the diskette around it could be read that he should make a copy first thing as it would likely die (finger oils collect junk.) He didn't get it so I referred him to a lab aid who was paid to explain things to folks. There was more than a language barrier. I'll just say that he didn't understand why I was concerned with sand and grit since he had lived in and around it all lhis life with no apparent problems.

I have a UPS but still tend to shut down when there are active T-storms about. Sure could use some about now! Getting a tad dry around here.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Bird]

</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
I have a UPS but still tend to shut down when there are active T-storms about

[/ QUOTE ]

Me, too.

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] We had a thunderstorm about a month ago that blamo'ed my FENTON UPS. The Fenton was new in December of '98 and I had just treated it to the second set of new batteries in June of '05....DRAT!! Anyway, something scrambled on the input side because it had a loud buzzing sound as if the core iron in the transformer was loose. On autopsy, it was a component on the circuit board that was making the noise. Sooooo..... over to Office Smacks for a new one, which lasted exactly four days and IT went kaflooey internally and had to go back to Smacks for a replacement after the help line person.....from India....had me run an "office" diagnosis and dtermined that it couldn't be fixed. [img]/forums/images/icons/frown.gif[/img] So now I have my second APC 1200 sitting here and it JUST bleeped to tell me that we had some kind of glitch, but the office lights didn't show it. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] You guys are giving me a headache with the computer "history" posts. I'm computer illiterate and have saved myself thousands of hours of frustration by not having worked with any systems until Windows 95 came out. I just looked it up and to my astonishment, my system is SEVEN years old and has: "Never had a wrench on the engine." except for a virus housecleaning last September. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Dave, Sorry if you find the various reminisces too stressing. Somewhere there must be a chat room specializing in youthful banter!! [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

Wana here about cars before electric starters? How about... Just kidding.

You did save yourself a whole lot of useless frustration by not trying WinDoze 1.0 and the like.

Ahh computer history... What about Admiral Grace Hopper and the earliest recorded "computer bug", actualy a moth I believe that got in some relay contacts or such and ended up "Scotch taped" in the log book as an explanation of a computer malfunction. Or maybe Countess Ada of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and the first computer programmer who worked with Babbage and his mechanical computer. She was born in 1815 which out of respect was the number selected for the programing language tech manual for the federal Governments Ada programing language.

Take notes, this may be on the midterm!


[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] When I attended a Community College before we called them COMMUNITY COLLEGES thay had an ancient UNIVAC computer in one of the rooms. The computer took up almost the whole room and had a HUGE air conditioning system to carry away excess heat. As I recall, it reported data on a long slip of paper similar to an adding machine, but a little wider. One of the cyber-nut-balls that worked with it asked it: "How many liters there were in a cubic light year?" Somehow he was able to program that question into the works. The thing ground, and ground, and ground and NEVER DID complete the answer. The paper came out with endless zeros, zeros, zeros. Later on, two of my roomates at the University took FORTRAn and pulled their hair out trying to work with it. I just concentrated on mastering the Momentum Equation; got a good grasp of why F=V2/2G, clutched my K&amp;E Deci-Lon slide rule close to my chest and hoped that computers were not something I would ever need. [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] In my working career I have completely worn out TWO pocket slide rules; a Magnesium Pickett, and a smaller version of my big desktop K&amp;E. [img]/forums/images/icons/wink.gif[/img]