A caravan park is a strange water customer: near-zero demand for months, then a summer weekend where two hundred pitches shower at the same hour. Designing for that pattern is a different exercise from designing for a building that uses water steadily all year.
The demand curve drives everything
Peak demand is brutal and short: morning showers, dishwashing, laundry. Sizing pumps for the Saturday-morning peak means equipment that idles most of the year, which argues for storage doing the buffering instead. A tank that fills through the week and drains through the weekend peak lets a modest system serve a crowd.
The configuration that works
- Buffer tank first: borehole or mains refills storage continuously at whatever rate the source allows.
- Variable-speed booster second: pressure stays constant whether one tap or forty are open, and the drive idles cheaply in the off-season.
- Modest redundancy: two smaller pumps alternating beat one large one for both wear and for the July Saturday that cannot go wrong.
Off-season is a design input too
Long idle periods bring their own failures: seals that set, water that stagnates, frost in exposed plant. Seasonal sites need drain-down procedures and a commissioning routine each spring, not just equipment sized for August.