ADVANCED TROUBLESHOOTING

This is for people who are familiar with electricity and have a voltmeter, ammeter and
ohmmeter and enough common sense not to fry themselves.

There are two basic symptoms:

1) Motor does not run

2) Something trips out



1. Motor does not run
         A) Makes no sounds - this most likely means no power to motor. First make sure you have put he cover back on the control box if it is 1 HP or less. Start at the pressure switch with the switch wedged open with a non-conductor and measure voltage leg to leg-AND to ground.
   
   If you do not have 230 volts (unless it is a rare 115 volt motor) trace back to
   the circuit breaker or fuse box. If you have 115 volts to ground on both legs
   at the pressure switch, you have both legs on the same hot leg and thus zero potential difference between them. Put one leg on the other hot leg.
   
   If you have 115 volts to ground on one leg and zero on the other, one wire is broken or one half of the 230 volt breaker is defective or tripped.
   
   If everything is zero at the pressure switch the wires are broken or the breaker is bad, or tripped, or the main power is out.
   
   If everything checks out then there is an open in the motor or in the control box or the wiring to the motor. Start by disconnecting the power at the breaker then di sconnecting the wires that go down the well from the control box. Use an ohm meter to check for continuity between all three wires (or two if it is a two wire pump). Also check each leg to ground. All should be infinity or at least 10 megohms to ground. The resistances leg to leg are small. The yellow is common and the yellow red (start) should be more than
   the black (run) to yellow. An open indicates a broken wire, bad splice or bad
   motor. A low resistance to ground indicates a bad motor or sub cables that are damaged.
   
   
         B) Motor hums, buzzes . This is either low voltage, a bad control box, mixed wire color code , shorted motor.

Do all the checks listed in (A) above.
If it is not covered in (A): Then follow the directions for troubleshooting below -

1. If the pump is new
       a) Ohm check the wires from the motor.
   The highest amp reading will be Red to Black.
   The next highest Yellow to Red and the lowest Yellow to Black.
   If your readings don’t agree, the color code is mixed down below.
      b) Wrong voltage control box. Only possible on ½ HP pumps where 230 volt or 115 volt motors are made. If 115 volt box is used on a 230 system, the control box relay will be expecting much higher amps and so will not drop out the start winding.
       c) Control box problems.  Sometimes they are bad out of the box.

There are four possible components in a control box: 

Start capacitors- black cylinders- most likely to fail. Look for burned off connectors, black gunk oozing out.  If it looks OK, you need an analog ohm meter. Short across the capacitor to discharge it, then put the ohm meter on it. It should show a low reading which increases to infinity over several seconds as the capacitor charges. These are cheap and readily available at any electric motor shop.

Run capacitors - usually metal cylinders - almost never fail. Overload relays - “Klixons” the red button. They fail. If they trip out, check the amp draw. If it is normal, the overload is bad. By-pass it with a jumper until you can get one. ( or forget about it) 

Start relay- black or blue square. Most difficult to diagnose. It depends on whether they are solid state (blue, or on some original, a small semi-   conductor looking thing) or electro-mechanical, a 2" square with MARS written on it somewhere. See Franklin-electric.com (www.fele.com) for details on this. If you get to this point, just replace the control box. 

Control box problems are often caused by short-cycling of the pump.

1. Something trips out. This means the pump overload or a circuit breaker or fuse. This does not mean the pressure switch.
   a) First check for proper voltage starting at the circuit breaker
       Then the pressure switch
        Then the leads going down the well.
   This can be difficult with control boxes that have covers that pull the guts out with them. These are for your safety and the manufacturers safety from lawyers, but they are a pain to troubleshoot. People in the industry make jumpers from two old control boxes. Your best bet is to put a short jumper on the three pump leads and wire nut them where you can get a probe on them. This also lets you make amp readings and ohm readings.
   
   b) Circuit breaker trip. If there are no voltage abnormalities, this is either a dead short somewhere or a bad breaker. If it takes some time to trip, look for bad breaker, too small a breaker or hot breaker box.  It may also be a small ground fault resulting in high amps but usually the pump overload will trip first.   
   
   If you are looking for a short or ground fault, open the circuit breaker so you don’t blow up your ohm meter, then start at the pump, disconnect the leads going down the well and check each leg to ground. You should get near infinity. Next check the yellow to red and yellow to black. These reading should be very low, 2 to 12 Ohms. The yellow to red should be higher than the yellow to black. The exact readings are available from the Franklin-electric.com web site, but they aren’t  that critical.  If you don’t find anything down the well, start working your way back to the pressure switch, then to the breaker, until something shows up.  Fix it. This will probably require pulling the pump or digging. The good news is that you will get your exercise without paying health club dues. 
   
   c) Overload trip.  This means high amps or bad overload. Again, assuming nothing showed up on the voltage check, take amp readings on all three wires. Look up the service factor amps on Franklin-electric.com, and compare.  These motors are actually designed for the service factor, i.e. a 2 HP motor is actually a 2.3 HP motor, so it doesn’t hurt them to run at SFA.  If the amps are uniformly high by 10 to 15% it probably means the motor and/or pump end are shot. If one leg is high it indicates a ground fault.  The red leg is the start winding, the black is the run winding and the yellow is common.  Any electrons that go down the red and black have to come up the yellow or go to ground. A single high leg is probably a ground fault.  If you put your amprobe around all three legs at once and have any current show, it is a ground fault. It can be motor or sub cable.
   
   When the motor starts you should see a momentary blip on the red lead amps which may fall off to zero on small pumps, or fall to a low level on capacitor start/capacitor run control boxes.  If you don’t see this, look for control box problems or an open in the start circuit. This usually is accompanied by high amps on the black-yellow leads as the pump tries to start. It is possible for the pump to start sometimes without the start circuit.

Bad Smelling Water

Bad smelling well water is usually caused from Hydrogen Sulfide - (H2S). It is commonly mistakenly referred to as Sulphur. It is a colorless, highly toxic and flammable gas. That rotten egg smell is the result of the bacterial breakdown of sulfates in organic matter in the presence of oxygen.

H2S gas is produced by bacteria in the ground and the gas is dissolved into the water and/or migrates into your well and water or the bacteria are in the well producing the gas. The gas comes out of solution when the water is aerated and depressurized. The treatment for H2S is to aerate or absorb or oxidize the gas so IOWs there are many way to remove H2S. It should be removed on a POE (point of entry) basis. Regular softeners do not remove it and it can cause resin problems. Regular carbon (charcoal) is not a good choice and disposable cartridge filters aren't either. Carbon is not to be used on water of unknown microbiological content. That's because bacteria thrive in carbon and can create more odor than in the raw water. Your disposable cartridges can cause your softener to fail due to their pressure loss and subsequent reduced water flow to the softener. You charge cartridges based on pressure loss, not looks. We can't see particles less than 45 microns in size. Carbon cartridges are usually rated at 5 microns. Pleated paper cartridges tend to filter smaller particles as they filter larger particles, IOWs they are 'progressive' meaning the more they filter the more they filter. That reduces water flow. The plumber shouldn't have used the cartrdige type filters which as you now see aren't working well.

Use of a solution feeder which is the most maintenance ridden type of equipment there is in the water treament industry That's where you pour bleach into a small tank with a pump on the top and it injects chlorine soution into the plumbing ahead of a retention tank. If so they don't work well especially if there is any fluctuation in the volume of H2S or bacteria in the water. The solution feeder, its required retention tank (maybe 120 gallons) and (there should be a) backwashed filter to remove any color in the water from the oxidation and the chlorine while they take up a lot of space.

Another approach is a chlorine pellet erosion type feeder that mounts on the plumbing like your disposable cartrdige filters and has a special mixing tank that's not much larger than your softener resin tank and then a backwashed Centaur carbon filter which is also not much larger than the softener resin tank. The maintenance is to add chlorine pellets every few months.

You can buy this equipment over the internet and hire someone to install it or find someone to help you install it, and save a considerable amount of money.