Replace a Square D Pumptrol Pressure Switch

Hi, I'm Mike with House on the Mend and in this video we're going to be replacing this existing Square D Pump Troll 4060 well pressure switch with a brand new one and at the same time we're going to be replacing the pressure gauge as well with this hardier liquid filled gauge. So let's zoom in and get started. All right so for the past several days we've been waking up to no water pressure inside the house and the issue is with the pressure switch of this well not kicking on when the irrigation turns on in the morning. Now the first thing you need to do on a project like this is to turn off the breaker switch that supplies power to the well. The next thing I did was pause the sprinkler system so it's not trying to go off and with no water pressure. So I've poured some CLR on this hose spigot here which is how we're going to drain the system in just a minute and I'm letting that do its magic so we might be able to get this hose on it to actually drain the water away but it's pretty heavily corroded out here so we'll see how far we get. Now in this particular case what you see right here is one of two tanks and then we have the water heading out this way past this ball valve and out to the the house so we need to shut this off so we're not getting any water coming back when we're going to purge the system right now. Next we want to drain the water that might still be in this existing line and in the tanks and we do that right here at this hose valve. Now it's looking kind of cruddy let's see if we can brush some of that off with a wire brush now those hose threads are not in good shape all right so not much pressure in there because the well went down overnight but I would really like to be able to keep our work area clean of water getting all over everything but I just don't think I'm going to be able to get this guy on there so let's see if we can come up with something else we might be able to put over there like a piece of rubber pipe or something that can lead the water away. All right so this is the top of my daughter's batting tee and we've got it hooked up to the hose here with a spring clamp and then I'm going to hook it right up here and hold it in place with another spring clamp and that'll shed some of the water away I don't think we're going to get a complete seal but at least it won't be flooded here while we're working there we go all right we are doing everything we can to stay in the shade this morning we have an awning set up and we're trying to beat the heat it's a little after seven o'clock in the morning here and it's already going to be a sweltering day so now that we've drained the water off we can start looking into changing out the components here so for safety sake the first thing I want to do is make sure that there is no residual electricity from the capacitors inside of the the well control so I'm just going to come right in here and against this plastic piece I'm going to close the connection and just make sure that capacitor is all drained out that way I don't run the risk of getting shocked or doing anything that's going to damage our well control system so that's good next thing we want to do is disconnect these two wire terminals here and while I'm doing that take a look at these terminals right here nasty it's probably not going to matter which is which they would have been marked differently if it was these are just completing a circuit sometimes it's a much more complex setup in this case we're just completing a circuit and we've got a well control box over here that's doing the rest but just in case I'm going to go ahead and mark this guy right here as the one that was on the left move those out of the way and next thing we want to do is remove this lead so that this conduit here so it's out of our way as well and we do that by getting in on this little threaded nut right here and that's just hand tight which is all it needs to be okay you see how these little leads are tapping and touching each other and they're going to touch this little thing that's why it's so important to make sure the capacitors in there that are about the size of your fist are completely discharged okay so over the winter I put all this foam insulation down here to try to keep the stem and everything else from freezing so I'm just going to remove that because we can use that over again it's a nice little 90 degree corner piece that I put in there right underneath this box there is a stem and then there's also a nut so that's where we disconnect this pressure switch from so we're going to protect that stem with a pair of channel lock pliers at the same time we unscrew this top piece so I'm going to set wrench here right to that right size in these channel locks and let's see if we can get this off of my crank there we go there we go all right no water's coming out in fact all I hear is air being sucked back in but if you look here you can see a bunch of corrosion inside this pipe so when I disconnect it from right here I'm going to make sure all that's cleaned out and then I also need to try to pick all that out that might be giving us some bad readings next thing we'll do is let's take off this pressure switch right here that'll give us an area to get in there and clean out all that gook look how old this pressure switch is it we've completely drained the system and it's still registering at 65 pounds of psi so that's when you know these are broken and that's the nice thing about this pressure switch here number one it's rated for higher pressure settings this one only goes up to 100 but number two you see this little lick this little bubble in here this is liquid filled and it's filled full of like a glycerin base very similar to say ethylene glycol which is antifreeze and that is going to do two things number one it's going to help keep this guy from freezing or overheating this one's rated for minus four degrees fahrenheit all the way up to 140 degrees fahrenheit so we don't reach either of those here in las vegas we do get below freezing and we of course get into the 115 range but this guy should be able to handle it but also this liquid inside when there's vibration going on it dampens that vibration so it won't have so much wear and tear on the needle and the gauge inside so i'll leave a link to this guy i got it right off of amazon and i don't think it was more than about five or ten dollars i'll leave a link to it yeah look at this see this goo coming out of there so yeah there's a lot of debris what happens is this well water has like rust and other gook in it and the well sticks get that going in it too and this stuff whenever the well has trouble and then kicks back on it tends to knock a lot of this stuff loose and we get we get this grimy stuff coming in that we have to filter out and you can see some of that obviously is clogged in here so we should get a lot better response from our pressure gauge as well as the the switch once we get all this stuff cleaned out all right so i went through a whole bunch of q-tips cleaning out this pipe as well as this fitting here and both sides and got down to the point where it was really just some kind of slightly muddy water so i think we're doing better there now i've applied thread tape to both sides of this stem and we're going to put that back in here and then we'll put in our pressure gauge and then finally we'll mount the new pressure switch so let's get this guy started that's feeling pretty tight okay now when you put a thread tape on just always be sure not to come up over the lip and thus impede the water from coming up and giving the pressure reading next we have our brand new pressure gauge start him in there i'm going to be careful not to put too much pressure on the gauge itself once i start feeling a little bit of resistance like that then i'm going to switch to a wrench and do the rest right here at the nut which is intended to take the torque unlike the glass window here so we're doing pretty good with tension i'm just going to take it right up to the spot where the window is clearly visible and we're going to stop there for now if it leaks i can always tighten it later when we're leak testing now we're ready to put in our new pressure switch and look at the difference between these two how clean this one is obviously but from a function standpoint if you look at these contacts you'll see they are closed because it's reading below the 4060 pressure right the 40 cut in so this guy here he's also got no pressure but the contacts are open which means this is a failed switch and i'm glad we're changing it out so we have our thread tape here there's no debris or anything it's nice and clean down there let's start threading this guy into place and if you see right here square d supplied this little cap since we're only going to have power coming in one side we've got this cap here to block off any critters or dust and sand from getting in at least through that port so that's pretty nice i'm about to the point where i'm going to switch over and let the wrench right at that nut do the last little bit of tightening that way we're not putting undue stress up here that's right where we had it before okay so next thing we want to do is rewire our system we're going to put these leads through and get this ring started down here all right so we've got that set into place and we've got this little ring in here tightened now we're going to go right to these two and if you remember i put this little mark here so we're just going to do it exactly the way as it was before now once we kick everything back on these two little guys are going to help us adjust our cut in and our cut out pressure so the 40 60 pressure to make sure it's just right for our particular needs but before we do that we need to come over and check the pressure on the two tanks to make sure the bladders inside are properly pressurized and let me show you how to do that next all right on the top of most of your pressure tanks you have a little cap right here that you take off and inside here you have what looks to be just like a tire valve or a bicycle tire valve and that little guy is what's used to introduce pressure into the tank so that the bladder inside helps keep a good amount of pressure in the tank thus more pressure in the line and that keeps your pump from having to work as hard so the pump doesn't have to kick on every single time you turn a faucet on for a small amount of water use so let's take a standard tire pressure gauge and let's test the pressure in here all right we have just a little over 20 so about 24 psi in this tank now normally you want your tank pressurized two pounds below the cut in pressure so in our case we have a 40 60 switch ideally you would want this tank pressurized to 38 pounds so we are way below that let's add some pressure to this guy and get it up to where it ought to be so this is one of your standard jump start boxes it's got a battery inside that can help you jump start your car the nice thing about this one is it has a little tire pump on the back of it so we've got that hooked up we've got a pressure gauge right here we're going to kick it on and it's really annoying but it's going to do the job all right so we got the tanks all pressurized where they ought to be and we're just about ready to purge the system but i couldn't live with how nasty that hose spigot looks so went and got a new one to replace it this one's rated for 200 psi so it'll be more than this system this household system could ever place upon it so we're just gonna screw that right in here i put some thread tape on it so we're gonna get it up here nice and tight all right our new spigot's installed and we've got a hose hooked up to it when we took the pressure switch off as well as this hose spigot we introduced a lot of air into our system from here where it's shut off back through the tanks and into the well and we've also loosened up a lot of grime when we were changing the pressure switch so we want to first purge the system of all the air and any nasty debris that may come out in in the initial flush and take a look at just how much we're getting so at the end of this hose i actually attached a shop rag and with a rubber band and we're just gonna do a little test to see just how much goo is coming out and then we'll know later on when we run it for a few minutes and put another towel on if that stays clean then we'll know that we've purged it all out so it's time to walk back up to the garage and click on the breaker switch so we can get the pump motor running all right so you heard the well kick on you can hear that little bit of rattle with the the pipes meaning that the pump's rolling we're not gaining any pressure yet because we're purging the whole system and as you can see here in this footage we've got pretty decent flow for having no built-up pressure and then also look at the difference between the dry area of that white shop rag and the area that the water is coming out of look at all that rust and goo that's being flushed out all right so i turned off the spigot to this hose and now we're pressuring the whole system because we flushed it well enough this was the initial flush here look at all that that's nasty and then after several minutes i hooked uh this fresh towel up to it and we only got a little bit coming out of there now we have a home filtration system that should take care of the rest of that but that's why you want to initially purge this system before you start introducing it into your irrigation and your house all right the well just kicked off and it looks like it was right past 60 pounds so this gauge is right on with the switch itself so let's do another test here i'm going to go open a hose and let's see when it kicks on there we go all right so just a little bit above 40 is where it kicked on that's really good all right so it's been about 20 minutes and we're still holding tight at 60 psi which is what this box is preset for so that's good i checked underneath here at all the various unions where we have the stem the switch where it meets the fitting down here as well as where this pressure gauge meets the fitting there's no leaks there nor back over at the hose spigot we changed out so that's good so let me take a moment to talk about these two adjustments right here basically you're cut in and cut out they call them the range and differential but when you read the instructions for the square d it's basically cut in cut out now it comes factory set at 40 60 that doesn't mean that's all this can handle it just means that's the factory setting that can be adjusted you can take a three-eighths inch driver just like this set it right down here and adjust both of these if you want a different in a difference in the psi when it cuts out and when it cuts in so over the next few days what we'll do is make sure this is the proper setting for us our house is quite a ways away from the well here and it's at a slight incline so by the time the water gets to the house it's not necessarily the same pressure and sometimes you may find that you need to increase or decrease this pressure at the house and the way you do that is is tested over a few days and then you can make these adjustments right here but until such time we're ready to just put the little cover on right here tighten it down just by hand and that'll keep it from getting blown off so now you know the steps it takes to replace one of these old ratty pressure switches for a nice clean new one as well as purge the system and test everything now let me say this is not a technically difficult replacement you just have to have basic plumbing and electrical knowledge anything beyond what we've done here you really should call a professional obviously you won't even have a truck with a boom to remove the sticks and get to the well pump itself but when dealing with the large capacitors of the control boxes or anything like that i would recommend that you just call a professional it'll be a lot better than now if you found this video helpful will you please give it a thumbs up it sure helps out the algorithm with youtube to start suggesting this to other folks i'll also leave a link in the description for all the various parts i used in this video we are quickly running out of shade here so i'm very much for watching well well well well you're giving me the blues well well well well with you there's always bad news you done me wrong so many times you about to make me lose my mind well well well well you're giving me the blues