Water Pressure Booster System: Standard Options with Yaskawa iQ1000

August 31st, 2018

You may find yourself considering the installation of a water pressure booster system, John Callaghan of Callaghan Pump and Controls  has installed pumps in and around the New York area for 25 years. He  believes that you should consider the Yaskawa iQ1000. In this case, the Yaskawa iQ 1000 version is touted by Callaghan for its smart drive technology. This is what is known in the industry as a variable frequency drive or a variable speed drive. According to Callaghan, several years ago Yaskawa recognized that the two largest pump markets for variable speed drive pumps were in the electric motor and fans markets.

So, Yaskawa decided to customize one of their variable speed drives for pumps – the iQ Pump 1000. The iQ1000 pump takes a large volume of programming work and streamlines it into an easy to use interface. Anything that you might want to program into a water pressure booster system, domestic water pump system, or a domestic water tank fill system – anything, it’s all included in the iQ 1000 software. The iQ1000 has a standard sleep mode feature which is one desirable of its desirable features, which allows the pump to be turned off when no one is using water.

The real issue is when you want the pump to “wake-up” or turn on again. The iQ1000 is adjustable to range of weighted pressures that it will recognize; however you decide to configure your set point of pressure, the sleep and waking points of the iQ1000 are also set to recognize these variables. So, at whatever point you decide to set your sleep point, the wake mode will be a set differential which will automatically recognize the pressure difference. For example,  if the pressure for sleep is 95 psi, the pressure for awake is negative (-5) psi – no matter what you change your pressure setting to, it will always wake up at (-5) pressure.

The iQ1000 also offers low suction shutdown as a standard feature. If you have no water pressure coming in, you always want to have your pump shutdown. As a rule, Callaghan notes that if you have a set point of 80 psi, then you should at the very least have a 20 psi aggregate for shutdown after any determined period of time, that could be anywhere from 5 seconds to 60 seconds, you determine that timeframe. If external systems like city water psi go higher than expected, at 20 psi over the iQ1000 will shut down as well. The outlined features are all built into the Yaskawa IQ 1000 drive.

Callaghan makes some final installation suggestions for water pressure booster systems:

• Use a ¼ inch stainless steel base with holes to grout
• Use cooper headers, not stainless, must plumbers are trained to handle copper