DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Any idea how much energy it takes to pump water from the bottom of a 150-foot deep hole in the ground? Yeah, me neither, but it’s probably a lot. We could see the impact on our electric bill when we began irrigating last Spring.

Now that we’re on the time-of-use plan, it’s important to conserve power between noon and 6pm on weekdays. I’m not going to be sitting around those afternoons working an abacus by candlelight, I can assure you — I’ll be bathed in the radiation of two LCDs, a G4, a powerbook, my office stereo, etc. But there’s no point running the well pump then, given that there’s a 1200-gallon storage tank, full, just uphill of the house. The day we use 1200 gallons of water between noon and 6pm is the day the UPS driver accidentally crashes his truck into the storage tank.

So I called our water-treatment-system maintenance guy to inquire about putting a timer on the well pump. I explained the situation briefly: the pump can run 18 hours a day if it needs to, but we want to cut the power between noon and 6pm on weekdays.

“Oh, you need a PumpMan,” suggested the treatment guy.

“OK,” I replied. “There’s already a PumpSaver on there, actually two of them. Would the PumpMan replace them?”

“I don’t know, you’d have to call him. Try Charlie over at Jaeger.”

“Err, what?”

“You’ll have to call a PumpMan.”

“OH,” I exclaimed, “I need to call a pump man.” At which point the water-treatment guy was probably thinking, what is this idiot smoking? I thought he had been suggesting a specific model of pump timing device, e.g. the “PumpMan 2000, single-phase brushless rotary submersible motor timer with digital readout!” But in fact he was referring my call to somebody else. He doesn’t do pumps.