My water comes from a well. When the well was drilled I had only built my shop and so the well is now powered by my shop. The pressure tank and switch is also at the shop. Now that the house is built I need to power the well from the house. This is fine but I am not gonna move the pressure tank and the pump switch must be at the tank for proper operation. The problem I must address is how to use the switch at the tank while using power from the house. I cannot run power from the house to the tank and then to the well pump because the voltage drop would be too great due to the much longer run of wire. My plan is to instead use the existing wires coming from the shop and going to the well to just carry switching power, not pump power. I want to use a couple solid state relays, one for each leg of the 240 power, to switch the power to the well. There is plenty of room to mount two solid state relays inside the well junction box. And I found AC controlled solid state relays that use 80 to 280 volts AC for control and will switch up to 480 volts AC at 25 amps. My well pump is a 2 HP pump that draws less than 10 amps. It is a capacitor start type pump so it draws less current at start up than a non-capacitor type pump. So, my questions: Are solid state relays suitable for this type of work? Are they typically able to handle surge current loads from motor starting? Here is a link to the relay in question:
- posted
3 years ago