What Should I Look For In A Solar Water Pump?

Today’s question is, “What should I look for in a solar water pump?” When looking at solar pumps online, there’s a whole range of options available. It can get kind of confusing as to what you’re getting with RPS versus some of the cheaper, lower quality pumps that you can find on Amazon, eBay, and a lot of the foreign websites.

Why would you want to pay more for an RPS pump when you can get one of these low price pumps? And the answer is, what you’re paying for is a higher quality pump with better support.

So the lower quality pumps, the really cheap ones, they’re either going to use cast iron metal, aluminum or other low quality stainless steels which are going to rust and corrode down in your well. Your well environment can be highly alkaline or acidic depending on your exact soil types and that’s going to have an effect on the metal and corrode over time.

A lot of those other pumps are also using lower quality electronics, whether it’s in the pump or an external controller. We see a lot of failures with those electronics over time due to the harsh environments and that includes hot and cold temperatures. All of that has an impact on electronics and if you’re not using high quality electronics, they have a tendency to fail really quickly.

Another thing we hear about time and time again is the post-sale support. A lot of these companies have zero post-sale support. If you want to give them a call, make sure you call them middle of the night, because during the day they’re usually sleeping because they’re in another country. If you can get anybody on the phone or an answer via email, it’s going to typically be incomplete and hard-to-follow instructions as we’ve seen in the past and heard from other customers. A majority of the time, what we hear is, there’s just no post-sale support.

They’re not able to answer questions and they’re not able to provide a warranty if anything goes wrong. Usually you have the, say, the 30 or 15 day return period, but after that you’re out of luck. While the difference in cost might be a couple of hundred dollars for the cheaper options, the difference in quality is priceless.