Sunshine,Solar pumps and Water- a fantastic partnership

Our water supply up at the farm comes from two sources, the first is rainwater harvest off the roof of the house and various sheds,which is collected in tanks then pumped up to a larger holding tank high up behind our house and gravity fed back to the house for our personal household use.
The second source is that it is pumped up from 300 ft underground using a big Grundfos submersible  electric pump operated by a big diesel generator.It also is  pumped up to another storage tank up the back and gravity fed to the garden and our laundry.
The pumping from the bore involved hubby trudging back and forward up to the generator about every hour as we have a low output bore and it was pumping dry in about 10 minutes.
We made the decision way back to replace the  grundfos pump with a Lorenze solar pump as soon as we could afford to do so( Hubby's brother next door had successfully installed one) and  we had been saving for ages, but hubby retiring  recently gave us a little extra  financial boost to complete  a few projects including the solar pump on the bore.
The first step was to lift the old pump up and out of the bore and hubby's brother next door came over with his tractor that has a bucket which makes the task a little easier.

The men had to pull out  a huge amount of  poly  piping, electric cable and safety cable, and then finally the pump itself.
They then installed the new post that the solar array  will be positioned on.

The  young assistant to the installer got busy building the frame.

They connected the new smaller,lighter solar pump up to the poly pipe( we were able to use the existing pipe and cable.)

Because  the new pump was much lighter, they didn't need to lower it with the tractor, the men were able to "walk" it down  to the  bore.

The  connections were all made, the pressure gauge was installed on top of the bore and  the electrical  control box installed.

The panels ( three  x 250 watt ) were  installed and the orientation  set correctly.

The  installer then did a test run to check the  amount of water that the bore  was producing.
It now flows at 8 litres per minute( just under 2 gallons), this is a very  slow bore, but  taking into account that this pumps while ever the sun shines, it  producers quite a bit of water   over the period of a  day , certainly more than we were getting before.
With the old pump  ,if we were away for a few days, we got no water pumped at all, now the pump keeps pumping away, controlled by a float up on the tank and the garden can continue to be watered  on timers.
 Hopefully we will now finally start to see a big difference in  how the gardens and the lawns   appear and what we can produce.
On my next posting I hope that I can show  a few pictures of the difference it will make.
So until we meet again, we will be keeping busy  moving sprinklers, and setting up spray systems all  around the yard,
Take care everyone,
Keep your fingers crossed for rain for us, it's all very dry out there,
catch you later,
Cheers,
Jane.