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Know Your Pumps

Griffin Pump & Equipment

Educating your staff on the science behind pump rentals will help them be the best solutions provider to your customers who need to move water.

Thompson Pump & Mfg. Inc.

To fully serve customers with large dewatering projects, you need to first understand the fundamentals of pumping, which can be broken down into flow, lift and distance.

The Gorman-Rupp Co.

There's a lot of science behind pumping fluids. Educate staff for best results when renting pumps.

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By Jenny Lescohier
Editor

Due to the current influx of federal stimulus money, some contractors are finding themselves taking jobs outside of their normal expertise. In so doing, they occasionally need to rent equipment they are not very familiar with, and pumps are no exception.

Pumps are a common item in many rental inventories, and in a lot of cases, renting them to customers is a simple matter of determining the right type of pump and the correct size. But when your customer has a large or complex project, pump rentals get more complicated, which is why it's important to ensure your employees know and understand the science behind pumps and how to properly set them up for optimum effectiveness.

The start to any successful pump rental begins with asking your customer what they are trying to do. This will help determine the follow-up questions and, ultimately, the design of the pumping system.

Some questions a rental counter employee should ask initially include:

Where is the application/pumping taking place?

What are you pumping?

How much needs to be pumped?

How high does the liquid need to be pumped up/how much does the liquid need to be lifted/is the liquid in a large ditch (in other words, what is the lift pressure)?

How long will you be pumping?

Small dewatering jobs can be handled by gasoline-powered wet-priming pumps with suction and discharge sizes of 2 to 3 inches in diameter. These pumps can run for several hours on a tank of gas and will move up to 250 gallons per minute. On the other hand, large dewatering or sewer bypass jobs are far more complex and can involve 24-hour pumping operation and flows up to 4,000 gallons per minute and more.

Start with the basics