Water Pumping Planning Guide
Pumping plans fail on missing answers, not on missing products. These four sections collect the answers in the order they affect the design.
1. Describe the source
Name the source: well, borehole, river, spring or an existing tank. Give its depth, and if it is a well or borehole, the water level rather than only the drilled depth, because the pump works against the water level. Note seasonal behaviour: a source that drops in the dry season changes both the lift and the yield the plan can assume. If the source is shared or seasonal, say so now rather than after the system arrives.
2. Measure the lift and the run
Total lift is the vertical distance from the water level to the highest point the water must reach, usually the inlet of a storage tank. Add the pipe run: its length, its rises and falls, and its diameter if pipe already exists. Long horizontal runs add friction that behaves like extra lift, so a tape measure and a site sketch are worth more at this stage than any catalogue figure.
3. Define the daily demand
State the water you need each day and what consumes it: households, livestock, irrigation, or site operations. State when it is used. Solar pumping delivers in daylight, so the standard pattern is a tank that fills through the day and serves all hours; size the tank with the demand, not after it. The sizing questions page lists the demand questions in checklist form.
4. Confirm and inquire
With source, lift and demand answered, the pump class and array can be matched honestly. The series page sets out the pump classes, the family page explains the solar water pump system, and the basics article covers the principles behind these questions. If the water is mainly for crops, the solar pump for irrigation guide works through delivery windows and line layouts.
Before ordering, confirm minimum order quantity and lead time for your configuration.
A note on measuring what you cannot see
Two of the four sections ask about things underground. The water level can be measured with a weighted line or a level probe in a single visit, and the visit is worth scheduling before any configuration is discussed, because a level guessed from the drilling record can be wrong by enough to change the pump class. Seasonal change can be learned from the people who use the source today: ask when it runs low, when it was last deepened or cleaned, and how it behaved in the driest year anyone remembers. That local testimony, written into the plan, is real data.
If the source is new and untested, treat test pumping as part of the project rather than as an optional extra. A day of testing tells you the sustainable yield, the working water level under draw, and whether the daily volume in section three is a plan or a hope. Systems configured after a test behave as expected. Systems configured before one occasionally meet a source that cannot keep its promises, and no pump can fix that meeting.
Photograph and pin the site
Add two cheap artefacts to the plan: photographs of the source, the tank position and the pipe route, and a pinned location for each. Photographs catch what measurements miss, such as the tree that will shade a noon array in one season or the track that floods across the pipe run. The pins let the sales team, and later the installation crew, reason about the same ground you are describing. Plans travel between people and companies before they become pipes and panels, and every artefact that keeps the site attached to the plan prevents a class of misunderstanding that no component quality can later repair.