Grundfos Pump Teardown - What Caused It To Fail

hey guys do you have a home boiler style heating system that has these types of pumps and uh ever wonder what was inside one of these pumps well today we're going to find out i just had my entire heating system replaced because my boiler had a crack in the heat exchanger and there were so many other parts that were old and in need of repair or completely failed in the system i had pretty much the whole system just ripped out and everything put in brand new including all the pumps and everything um these are these are pretty interesting setups um these grunt floss pumps in particular have a cartridge where when the innards stop working like bearings and stuff go out you can just take the whole motor apart from this part with those four bolts that you see holding it in place and just replace the inner parts the inner workings which is called a cartridge i've actually got a larger pump right here i did that once already so let's take a look inside these i'll show you a little bit about them and uh what we believe went wrong on the boiler system that i've got and there's evidence of it in the little pump that i was showing you here let's take a look all right if you take a good look at this system water is designed to go in one side this section right here has an impeller actually in this side it has a direction of flow on it water comes in this side has an impeller inside this section here that spins and then shoots water out to this side now this says with check valve also so that just means on this end there's a thing so that when you take this side off the valve closes uh so that water doesn't go through um that's what it's supposed to mean any who on our boiler i have three zones first floor second floor and basement and the basement pipes go underneath the floor and what we believe happened is some of the pipes under the floor in the basement somewhere in there there's a pipe that got a hole in it and started sucking in dirt and gravel into the system and if i take a good look inside this see if i can get you just the right angle here don't know that i can yeah hang on let's zoom in a little bit more for you all right see right there there we go that looks like gravel and stuff stuck right down inside this system and it's it's really kind of brown and rusty which isn't completely unusual anytime you've got pipes that have a little bit of um iron and stuff in them to get that rusting anyways but that is not supposed to be there that's definitely different so we're going to take this thing apart and see what's actually inside this and if there was any damage or anything that occurred we'll take both pumps apart just to see what's inside them so let me get the tools to get started um all we've got to do is remove there's four of these little bolts here with um hex fittings so let me go get a wrench for that and uh we'll take it off all right let's see if i can do this and let you guys see what's going on i got kind of a goofy setup here sorry as you can see they're not in there real tight just you know it's got a rubber gasket in there to create a seal so it just needs to make that seal this one's a little tighter there we go it's just hard to get out one more all right set those bolts aside moment of truth here uh grab a hammer to tap on this here trying to break it loose here and already look at the dirt and stuff that's falling out there holy cow oh you know what hang on a second there's i believe there's something on the back end of this let's take this label off the back there there we go see it just clips in here or it just snaps in with these pieces here but it's just hard to pop loose and there isn't anything in there holding it in place it's just it's just a pain to get out so what we're gonna have to do it's something like this there we go and you can see it's starting to separate now can you yeah there you go so we just there we go just got to be careful with that now if you look inside here this is the the windings of the motor there is a gasket down there that helps to seal that end these are the permanent windings of the motor let's put that back down in there hope that looks good and here is the cartridge that would typically come out of here so the fact that it's oh there it goes there it goes wiggling out that this whole thing can be replaced holy cow and there's dirt and rocks and stuffs coming out of it so there was rocks that were rattling around in there probably it feels really good but that's what's in there that is the little impeller right there it like sucks water in and then spits it out a tiny little thing is all that's needed to get water moving through all the pipes in your house wow all the rocks and stuff i'm gonna have to clean this up with some iron out but that's what's in that pump oh look at that i don't know what that is right there even that's i'm not i don't even know what that is what is that it's not supposed to be there wow something's got sucked up inside here that wasn't supposed to check that out okay so i'm going to clean this up and this pump once it's cleaned up it's in dispense great there's no end play you can pull this in and out like that there's no in play on it and that's where a lot of wear would happen feels great so i'm going to go ahead and put this back together and it's a good pump after it's cleaned up and then we'll get to the other one and see what it looks like inside alrighty well we got our little one soaking down here in clr which seems to be doing a pretty decent job actually let's get this one apart i've got uh the bolts already already removed that one came apart a lot easier ew that water in there is nasty looking that's what she looks like on the inside and this one is just a bigger area with a bigger impeller and this does look like there's a little bit of end play in that i don't remember if it was like that initially or not got a little rubber gasket there yeah that's nasty this one may have some wear i think these have graphite bearings seems like it turns nicely kind of a little stiff but that in play there i don't think it's supposed to have that in play i think that'll cause it to rattle so i would say this cartridge if it were up to me i would not use it let's see if we can get it out i think i don't think that has to come out pretty sure it doesn't it's starting to separate um having a hard time with it now let's see what happens we're gonna i think it'll go all the way through this is just a hard one to separate out and i don't recommend doing this at all there we go and it's starting to come out nicely now we're kind of at a point where we can't get anything in there oh let's try this and again i don't recommend this should come apart a little bit easier than this we just want to see what's in here might need a wedge starting to sweat all right let me work on getting this out and i'll come back to you folks all right we got her apart here this does stay in there and by trying to pull it out i kind of screwed up the threads there which i don't care like i said i'm not going to be you reusing that um this part actually is still usable this is just fine there's nothing wrong with this but um i don't think i'm going to be reselling it because i was hitting it over here so i'm just going to pitch this um what happened though there's a lot of black stuff coming out of here oops hang on there's my clock it is noon i should be eating right now but this had a hydro separator on it where the small pump that's down there in the sink right now was on the boiler side and the small pump circulated water through like say this was a tank your boiler is sitting over here the small pump just pumped water into this little tank it's called a hydro separator right here the big pump this one was over on this side and this went out to the pipes through the house and circulated through here and it shared this water so as the boiler would pump water into this the house pump this big one going out to the supply of the house side would pull water out of this and it would circulate water through here as well and they would kind of share that water intermingle this is like a little mini tank it helps with efficiencies and shock prevented when pumps come on and off and valves open and close and all kinds of stuff like that so it's a really good setup my new boiler we actually reused that on there this since it was on the side of the house where the um pipes would have gone through the basement floor this i think this pump would have taken the majority of the beating for any kind of dirt and stuff that came in and it shows look at the water down there that's coming out of this it's black i think it just wore this out these have got ceramic bearings in there and i think that's our ceramic or graphite and i think that's like a ceramic or graphite slurry right there coming out of this it was still working that shows you how durable these pumps are but still i mean if i turn it just right i could hear just now i could hear a little piece of grain of dirt or something in there and i heard that occasionally when i was running the pump like did you hear it little scratchy sound here and there and i could hear that occasionally when it was running so that explains what that noise was and why this is in such bad shape so that'll definitely cause trouble so that's that's anyway that's what's in the pump if you have one of these that failed though and you can get it out easily like the one down there you can just buy a cartridge this cartridge is a third of the price of the entire pump so anyway just wanted to show you guys what was inside these things and how they work and uh hope you found it at least somewhat interesting i'm gonna go throw this thing away because it's nasty see you guys later apparently we are not done yet what i discovered is this will actually come out from inside of here too and you can see inside there i mean if i pull my finger through there look at all that and now see that's that's that's one of the little bearings right there actually no that's a rubber one i wonder if that was deteriorating there i think right under there was a bearing or something but wow look at that definitely something i think it was just rubbing this thing to pieces just destroying all of this up in here wow yeah there's a little there's the little bearing thing right there and see i can wiggle it that thing was just being destroyed wow that's a lot of play okay i thought you'd find that interesting i'm gonna clean up because this is a mess

Channel: Floyd Nash Fix It Dad

Views: 21,307

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Id: MDTJBoYL_Ws

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 13 2022