River Pump, Round 2

As if round 1 of putting the river pump out wasn't bad enough, here we are barely 6 weeks later taking it out and doing it all over again.

The pump quit moving water last week, although the motor still worked and ran, nothing was coming out the other end at the irrigation pond.  We made the decision to pull it out Thursday to discover that the diffuser plate on the bottom of the pump had cracked and partially dislodged, allowing the motor to run and pump water, but not build enough pressure to get the water up the hill over 15 fairway to get down to the pond. 

We had a part overnighted from Minneapolis, and then had the distinct pleasure of spending most of the afternoon on Saturday, my 29th birthday, back down in the river after our nice morning rain shower.  I forgot how much I love crawling around under a steel cage down in the Red River...

New diffuser plate in the bottom of the pump

My view from underneath the pump float

Pump and assembly ready to go back in

Hookup complete and pump running.  This time we managed to get the entire
thing in and out without the use of an excavator.  I think Andy only got the
tractor stuck once...

Amazingly, we managed to get the thing back out of the river, fixed, and put back in again without any major injuries or mishaps.  This whole thing is a recipe for disaster.  The worst part is that I have very little confidence in that pump that it will make it though the rest of the summer without having to come back out again for more repairs.  Even worse, between Andy and I we put in a total of about 20 man hours during our hottest days of the spring down in the river working on the pump.  Those are 20 hours we lost working on the course that could have been put to much better use fertilizing, seeding, spraying, watering the greens, etc.

To make matters all the worse, the pump went down during what so far has been our hottest, driest span of the spring.  Our high temps last week were 75, 82, 85, 66, 77, 88, 89.  Our average high temp during this week of May was supposed to be about 67 or 68.  Not only that, but before our nice shower on Saturday morning, we had only received about .45" of rain since the beginning of May, and most of that fell in the first few days of the month.  Lastly, the humidity has been extremely low and the winds very blustery, usually from the south.  Daytime RH (relative humidity) during the week was usually about 20%-30%.  That is dry.  When we get into the heat of summer and start talking about having really humid days and heat indexes, daytime RH is usually 60%-80%.  Needless to say, we were pumping out some serious water during the week.

We almost had the irrigation pond completely full on Monday last week.  The river pump quit sometime on Sunday evening, and over the next 5 days we pumped close to 1.4 million gallons of water out of the pond to water the course with, which lowered the water level about 2 feet in just those 5 short days.  We were pumping out water last week, this third week of May, equal to what we would have been using in a hot and dry span in July or August.  I have a really bad gut feeling about how this summer is going to treat us weather wise....lets all keep our fingers crossed for some timely rains and moderate temperatures.  Unfortuntately, this spring so far has not been very indicative of that happeneing.

This is the panel display on our pumpstation on Friday morning, after it was
88 the day before and predicted to be 92 that day.  If you look closely, you
can see that we pumped 279,000 gallons of water just overnight.

I hope everyone gets the idea how much I despise this river pump and how pathetic and old fashioned this method of pumping water is.  It is totally unreliable and I just have a gut feeling that something is going to go wrong again at just the worst time of the summer.  Our fallback plan of putting gas pumps in the pond across from 14 fairway and running hoses across the fairway to the irrigation pond is equally ridiculous.  A more permanent solution for filling our pond needs to be addressed in the coming years. 

However, in the meantime Andy gets kudos for coming up with the idea of us building a dock out into the river to put the pump on.  Instead of a steel cage that we have to lift and push out everytime the pump needs serviced, if we had a dock we could simply walk out to the end, hook the pump onto it, and drop it in. 

That being said, if anyone has any parts from an old aluminum dock from their lake house that they don't need we might be able to find some use for it......