Not much of a comment, except to say:

Oh, man, how my father would have loved newsgroups with questions like this,
sigh...... He was an engineer, we had a house on Lake Erie, and a cottage
on Georgian Bay........ he used to get the monthly(?) reports from the Army
Corps of Engineers about water levels on the Great Lakes. And, I swear,
only my dad could get excited when he talked about "acre feet" (the amount
of water necessary to cover one acre with one foot of water).

Through in a question about pumps in parallel, and he would have been in his
element, sliderule & all!

[I realize this post was of no help whatsoever to Scott, who asked the
question, but the memories that the question evoked are priceless.]

And then's the question that occurred to me when I read an earlier thread
(very embarrassing not to know the answer, as I'm sure I should know it):
"Does a pump have to work harder to move water that's 6 feet under the
surface than water that's 2 feet under the surface"?

Anne Lurie
Raleigh, NC







"Scott Evans" wrote in message
...
In a recent posting here, someone had lost their pump, and was wondering
what needed to be done to keep their fish safe until a replacement could
be found/installed. That got me thinking (never a good thing, but I
digress) a bit about how to minimize the short-term impact of a pump
failure. Going under the assumption that it takes a certain amount of
power to pump a given quantity of water, would it make more sense to
have multiple smaller pumps hooked up in parallel (with appropriate
back-flow check valves) rather than a single large pump? It shouldn't
take any more power to pump the water; the only additional cost would
be the initial plumbing and pump costs. It might be a worthwhile
tradeoff for peace-of-mind to put out a little more money upfront to
make sure that a pump failure won't take down a whole pond ecosystem.

Comments?

Scott