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Had a real wake-up call about my ladder pump setup last month
Honestly, I was running my cutterhead dredge on the Mississippi near St. Louis, and an old hand from another crew came over. He watched for about ten minutes and said, 'You're running that ladder pump way too shallow, you're just stirring up mud and losing pay dirt.' He was right. I had the suction head maybe two feet off the bottom, thinking it was fine. I dropped it down to four feet like he said, and the material load in my pipeline jumped by what felt like 30% almost instantly. I was basically working harder for less. Changed my whole approach to watching the slurry density gauge versus just the engine RPM. Anyone else had an experienced operator point out a simple fix you were totally missing?
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masonb426mo ago
That slurry density gauge is everything. We ran too shallow for a week on the Ohio before our foreman caught it. Cost us a ton of material.
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alicecooper6mo ago
You sure it was the gauge's fault? Sometimes the mix just goes off no matter what you read.
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derekjenkins6mo ago
It's amazing how often the fix is just one small change. We get stuck in our ways and miss the obvious stuff right in front of us. How long were you running it shallow before he said something?
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