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Old 10-25-2012, 12:19 PM   #4
SteveC7010
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Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Northville NY in the Adirondacks
Posts: 2,128
If you suspect that the previous owner installed the pump himself, then the behavior you are reporting suggests that something is not right in the water system. My guess is that someone tried to "improve" the water system with less than sterling success.

Since you've got some experience with RV's, you will know that these pumps have a pressure switch in them which senses the system pressure and tells the pump when to turn on or off. Normal operation would be that you open a faucet and the pressure drops enough to trigger the pump which pulls water from the fresh water tank and pushes it out through the faucet. When you close the faucet, the pressure in the pipes rises switching off the pump. The whole pressure switch system is dependent on the plumbing system being closed so that pressure rises beyond the trigger point and the pump is shut off.

Your pump running for an hour suggests to me that something was hooked up incorrectly when the new pump was installed or, as I mentioned before, an attempt at "improving" something didn't work so well. Even with a typical two gallon accumulator tank, the pump should only run for a minute or two at most after shutting off a faucet.

The "spitting and sputtering" should not be happening either, but I suspect that something is draining some of the water from the piping.

This is one of those situations that we can only guess at from a distance. What needs to happen is that everything gets traced, tested, and verified for proper connection and function.

I am not sure how Keystone plumbs two fresh water tanks to the pump. And, I don't know if shut-off's or check valves are in there or not. With a single tank system, you've got a feed line from the tank to the pump. The pump feeds the rest of the system. The city water connection joins the system down stream from the pump so as not to back feed into the fresh water tank. Part of the closed system is a properly functioning check valve in the city water connection.

It is possible that the pump has a bad check valve or pressure switch or both. If you have another pump available to you, swapping out the pump would be the fastest way to determine if the pump or the system is at fault.
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