Pump and Motor Parts: Understand How Your Pumps Work

If you own a commercial or residential rental property in New York City, chances are you have many pumps that keep the building going, whether to distribute water to taps, feed the boiler, or eject sewage from kitchens and baths. It’s helpful to understand how pump and motor parts work, so you can make small repairs on your own or describe a problem to us when you call Antler Pumps for service. Here are some basics about how pumps work and the essential parts that keep this equipment running.

Pumps: A Living Physics Lesson

Transformation of energy

The pumps in your building are an easy way to see physics in action. They work by transforming one kind of energy into another to move water and other fluids from location to location.

For example, most pumps these days are powered by electricity. This electrical energy is converted to kinetic energy in the pump’s motor, which is then transferred to the parts of the pump that actually move the fluid (see below).

The fluid moved by your pumps may even undergo further changes in energy. When water is pumped into the boiler for use in the building’s radiators, it eventually becomes steam, which is a type of heat energy — which can be transferred again to keep people and their living environments warm.

Two Primary Pump Types

Positive displacement pumps

This is the oldest type of pump that has been around since ancient civilizations, albeit in cruder form back then. Nowadays, you probably don’t have this kind of pump around your apartment or office building, but they are used in industrial settings, such as for pumping petroleum or spray-painting automobiles.

With a positive displacement pump, a vacuum is created that draws fluid into its place, similar to the action of sucking on a drinking straw. Most often the mechanism in this kind of pump is a screw (the original form) or piston.

Centrifugal pumps

Most of your pumps are centrifugal pumps that use centrifugal force to move fluids. If you’ve ever used a salad spinner or a clothes washing machine, you’ve seen this force operating. It’s an outward force exerted within a rotating frame.

The impeller, which looks a bit like a fan with blades, moves the fluid in this type of pump by spinning it rapidly and forcing it outward. It’s likely that all the various water pumps in your property are centrifugal pumps.

The impeller is connected to the pump’s motor via a shaft. Centrifugal pumps are defined by the relationship of fluid to this shaft. When fluid moves parallel to the shaft, it’s known as an axial flow pump, and when the fluid is perpendicular to the shaft, you have a radial flow pump.

Some impellers are completely shrouded, or encased. In other instances, they’re fully open or only shrouded on one side.

Pump and Motor Parts You Should Know

Understanding your machinery

The impeller portion of a centrifugal pump sits inside a casing. This protects the pump components from exposure to the outside, and it protects users from the fluids being pumped as well as the pump’s mechanism.

Pumps are mounted where they need to work in order to remain steady and stable. It may be screwed in place or use a system of straps to hold it there. If you have a lot of noise coming from your pump, the first thing to check is the mounting to make sure it hasn’t come loose.

Modern pumps use a number of gaskets, seals, and O-rings to keep liquids separated and protected and to preserve the integrity of the pump too. Just as the gasket around your refrigerator door keeps cold air in and hot air out, the gaskets in your pumps do a similar job. They may keep water from leaking out or assist valves in controlling the flow of liquid in and out of the pump.

Valves are basically just little gateways in pump systems. One of the most common examples of valves in everyday life is the valves in your heart, which is also a pump. When valves in mechanical pumps become old or worn, they can crack, harden, and break, which causes them to fail. They can also become clogged with sediment or mineral scale if you have hard water. It’s vital to clean or replace malfunctioning valves immediately, or your pump could stop working entirely.

Other pump parts you will likely have to deal with include:

• Bearings to reduce friction and help the pump run more smoothly and with less noise (another thing to check if you have a loud or screeching pump)
• Lubrication, such as grease or oil to further decrease friction, just like in the engine of your vehicle
• Strainers to remove the particulate matter mentioned above and keep your pump clean

While the way pumps work hasn’t changed all that much since the advent of electrical power, there is one piece of technology that has vastly improved their operation: pump controllers. These are devices that monitor and automatically adjust pumps without humans having to perform any intervention.

As you can imagine, pump controllers can reduce the need for manpower to operate pumps, freeing staff up for tasks elsewhere. They detect minute changes in the pump or its associated system and can either counteract those changes or shut the system down if it is in danger. Pump controllers today can send alerts to operators if something is wrong and prevent long-term damage to expensive pump equipment. We therefore often recommend them to our clients to help extend the lifespan of pumps as well as plumbing, boiler, and other building systems.

We encourage all our clients to ask questions when we perform service calls, so they understand their pumps better. Every pump is a little different, so it’s great if you can gain some knowledge about your unique pumps to keep them running properly and to know when to call in the experts for help.

Need assistance or repair with one of your building’s pumps? Call Antler Pumps at 212-534-2500 or schedule a service call using our easy online form at your convenience.