With regard to the fountain at Blogland Water Gardens, I very soon got it going again. This time i made it easier to extract the pump if it did fail on me again. This unfortunately makes it more 'nickable' and thieving from displays is a problem the Blogland Water garden site suffers from with nauseating persistence. The pump was not preforming quite so lively as the previous one, which annoyed me. Where was the quality control on these things?
As for the reliability of the pump, I am reassured to a certain extent by another employee of BWG that the fault should have been sorted if the pump comes from stock post late May 2006. The cynic in me just doesn't say anything but has an enormous think bubble that says something like "We'll wait and see!".
This also makes me think with guilt of some of the articles I have written in the past testing pumps for performance. One thing I could never test for was the reliability, which if I was buying a pump, that would be the first thing on the list of qualities I would require. All we have to go on is the guarantee as displayed on the side of the box. There I was with the power to damn and denigrate and to declare a winner of the ultimate accolade of the best pump on the market (of its type) after just a few days of tests. Goodness knows what would have happened if the tests had gone on for 6months a years or even more. One pump i test and slagged off to the nth degree was a Little Giant from the US. I had that pump for years after using it to pump out filth and stagnant ponds the like of which would have seized and wrecked innumerable 'better' pumps.
In one article I did, I had this range of pumps that could best be described as 'all round' performers. In the tests it so happened that the cheapest pump came top in all the tests, although it did use a lot more power than the others. It was actually based on the old fashioned sump pump design. A 'Tried and tested' design you might think. After the test and before I had finished the article I took the pump to a job that involved pumping out a pond. Here the pump performed to its usual abilities for approximately 5 minutes and then blew up, or at least blew all the fuses to the outside main and burnt itself out inside. That was unfortunate since it was a timely reminder that there is more to a submersible pump than the gushing torrent of water that emerges from its outlet. So the unfortunate pump didn't get a very good review.
This wasn't a 'one-off'. When I started at the Water Gardens this time round, because of the on-going problem of thefts from the site during the day and night at the water gardens, it was decided to use in all the display ponds a brand of pump that had been bought in on a 'special deal'. These were retailing at less the 50quid, which was about a quarter of the price of a similar powered pump from a company with a good reputation. These pumps had a two year guarantee, which if these had not been pinched in less than a year, then there would be good value for money out of them.
The trouble is they started to conk out one by one about 6-9months after they went in. Once again I had made them hard to steal and so I was annoyed having to replace them. Each time I replace them, the lesson is reinforced that its just not worth taking the cheap option.
