WorldWide Drilling Resource

71 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® JULY 2013 My dad gave me a copy to read, and it is so informative that I have to have my own copy. Thank-y, Pat Currie Leeton, Australia Detecting Dry Run by Bill Corey Pentair Water Training Institute There are a couple of different ways to detect dry run. Remember: the pump is running...water is being moved...and water has weight. If we change the amount of weight we are moving, the amount of work necessary to lift the weight changes. One way to detect work in a pump is to measure the amps. So if the amps are lower than what we set our protec- tor for, the protector will turn off the pump on low amps. Our single-phase protec- tor (SPP) will turn the pump off if less than 80%, or more than 125% of the set point or calibration. I had a customer once who said he had five zones. The pump worked great the first four, but would always trip on the fifth. When I asked for the flows, he said the first zone was 40 gpm, the second was 36 gpm, the third was 38 gpm, the fourth was 42 gpm, and the fifth was 20 gpm. He got a little upset when I laughed at him and said, “You told the SPP to turn off the pump.” He of course said he didn’t want it to turn off. I agreed he didn’t want it to, but the last zone was only 50% of the first, and since the SPP works at 80%, he was telling it to turn the pump off when it got to that zone. Our PID variable frequency drive uses pressure to sense how much work it is doing. So when the pressure drops below 10 psi, we assume the drive is out of water, and therefore needs to turn the pump off. The drive is then told to wait 10 minutes before it turns the drive back on. Now remember, the well ran out of water and the pump has to have about 10 feet of water above it to compress the air that has gotten into the pump enough to have water in the first or bottom impeller. Even if this hap- pens and the pump was not ready to turn off, the well could be pulled down again and run out of water again. This drive is designed to turn the pump off a second time and wait another 10 minutes to turn it back on. It will do this three times before it faults on what we call a hard fault - meaning it takes someone to push the fault reset button and then the start button to restart the drive. Of course, any time you push the fault reset button you had best know the problem is fixed or the drive will simply fault again. Next month, let’s talk about “Too Many Faults.” Bill Bill Corey may be contacted via e-mail at admin@ worldwidedrillingresource.com Julie & Brenda for Boshart. Winner...Bob Woodcum. Josh & Shawn from Watson Benzie LLC. Brock & Chad for Baroid IDP. Laura & Jim Welser Conference Committee Members Time fo r s ome fun!! Speaker Tim Williams. A very busy trade area. See more photos at www.worldwidegeothermalresource.com .