I was going to include more information and a video clip but I'm away from home and my water now does not work so I'm posting sooner rather than later. I have a bilevel house with a water pump in a crawlspace. I don't have the model number or other information on hand right now, but it's a few decades old. Recently, the pump is taking extra time to run, similar to a car engine trying to turn over. I hear a low hum as usual before it kicks on, but the hum is now lasting for 5-10 seconds. When I flush the toilet, I can't run water afterwards for a minute because if I do, the toilet stops flushing and no water can come out. In the shower, the water stops running or only dribbles, every 10 minutes or so, which is less time it takes to empty the water tank. I have well water and a septic, if that helps at all, and this problem is fairly recent, it's only been occurring for a week or so. Is my pump bad or could it be something else?
Plumbing – Why is the water pump humming and starting slowly
plumbingpumpwater
Related Solutions
The overflow tube drains directly into the bowl, not the tank. The only way I can think that it would prevent the tank from filling is if it was cracked or had a hole in it and allowed tank water to drain into the bowl. If this was the case, you would notice the fill valve cycling if it was a slow leak or never shutting off if it were a large leak. The reason the tank fills quickly when you divert the bowl refill tube into the tank is that you are simply not splitting the water from the fill value between the tank and bowl any more.
It sounds like your fill valve assembly is the problem. The fill value has 2 outlets, one that directs into the tank, and the other that sends water into your bowl refill tube. My best guess is that something inside of the fill value got clogged with sediment, hard water deposits, or something else that restricted it. These are relatively cheap to replace and likely not worth the time to clean them out in my opinion.
OK... so the mystery has been solved. :-)
The problem got so bad today that the failure rate reached 100% (every time the pump came on it would churn for >30 seconds)... I got a lot of text messages. When I got to the pump, I noticed that during these failures there didn't seem to be any flow at all, and I could feel the pressure build up around the coupler just below the flow control check valve (the one above the ejector pump).
I began to suspect the issue was with this valve, so I took it off and found it was basically just a disk inside a cylinder. It was not attached to anything (no hinge to keep it from flipping over freely). This effectively made the valve stop flow in either direction. I guess that the valve was originally something like this:
The issue may be similar to the issue described in this video, except my valve (American Granby SPCV200) was a swing check valve:
Best Answer
Sounds like the "pump is bad", which may be caused by any number of conditions that need to be examined prior to burning out the next one.
For example, we bought a place in which the 230VAC had been fed to the pumphouse using 12AWG Romex strung 150 ft through the bushes. This probably resulted in excessive voltage drop before the power got down the hole to the pump, causing premature failure in a 1.5 hp pump more than 200 ft down.
There could be other problems with algae, sediment, clogged pipe, low water, inadequate pressure tank for your home, etc. A deep well pump over 15 years old, or so, may be due for replacement anyway.