In front of the impeller on a sprinkler pump, there is either a bolted casting holding a nozzle and a venturi throat, or nothing at all except a plain suction flange and an open impeller eye.

A submersible pump motor sits at the bottom of a cased hole, roughly 80 to 400 feet down on most residential wells, bolted under the pump end and hanging on the drop pipe.

Your mower comes Thursday, and you walk your field at first light to be sure.

The questions start about ten seconds into the call, and they come fast. Do you have water at all?

That rotten-egg odor coming out of a faucet has a specific cause, and it is not actually eggs at all.

You reach for a glass of water, and the pump kicks on before the faucet is even halfway open.

A well pump acting up puts you in front of a real decision, and it's rarely obvious which way to go from the surface.

A well pump runs buried in a casing or tucked away in a pump house, largely out of sight and easy to forget about until the water stops.

That flash on the horizon and the crack of thunder a few seconds later usually means the strike landed somewhere close, maybe a mile or two away, not on your property at all.

You turn on the kitchen tap, and instead of a steady stream you get a cough, a spray, then a burst of air, then water again.

A well pressure tank is the quiet component that keeps your water flowing steadily and keeps your pump from running itself into an early grave.

You flip on a faucet, nothing comes out, and a trip to the electrical panel shows the well pump breaker snapped off.

A well system has no city main behind it, so something has to decide when the pump runs and when it rests.

If your home runs on well water, the single most useful thing you can know about your system is how far down it reaches to find the water.

City water arrives at your house already pressurized by the utility. A private well does not have that luxury.

A sprinkler system that suddenly performs worse than it used to is easy to explain: something broke.

An irrigation pump that used to soak the far end of a field now leaves the last zone or two looking dry.

You buy a sediment filter rated to last a month, and it's brown and choked within a week.

Three numbers do almost all the talking when shopping for sprinkler pumps: 1 HP, 1.5 HP, and 2 HP.

A healthy well system runs the pump in steady stretches, then lets it rest. So when you hear the pump clicking on, off, on, off in quick bursts every few seconds, something has broken the rhythm.