Having discussed my experience with different well screen designs in former columns, if you get the idea I’m a proponent of stainless steel or bronze wire wound screens, you are right. Actually, I’m not sure bronze or brass screens are available anymore. I have not seen a new one in a lot of years. In my opinion, that is OK. Stainless steel works very well, at least in the waters we encounter here in the Midwest.
I was visiting with a pump contractor a few weeks ago and was interested to learn that his business has nearly doubled this year over last year. I asked why he thought it was doing so well; was it pent up demand after four years of a tough economy, the loss of a competitor or something else?
You can’t trademark natural resources, but ownership of them is increasingly becoming an issue as those resources become scarce. In fact, the question of ownership over water rights has become a knock-down fight. Water shortages have been an issue in the western states in the U.S. for well over 100 years and officials could foresee even back then that water was limited.
If you don’t have good water, it doesn’t matter what other resources you have. Securing a good public water supply is one of the most basic but most important concerns for any town. Like many municipalities, Baton Rouge, La., has found its water supply stressed to its limits by population growth and city expansion.
The deck I discussed last month is looking good although the boards have shrunk a little bit—it’s OK, though. It is time to get back to our discussion of well screens.
Last month, we looked at using non-pressurized storage tanks with booster pumps to provide usable amounts of water when you have a slow-producing well. We mentioned several ways of communicating between the storage tank and well pump to tell the pump when to start filling the tank and when to stop. But, what if the tank is a half a mile away from the well up on a hill? That’s the issue we’ll discuss this month.