Choosing the pump

Still going. The pump is ordered but not yet in the hole. Written 14–15 October 2026. The specification questions below are the ones we are still nailing down with the supplier, and this entry will be updated once it is installed and running.

Two quotes arrived on the same day. Same borewell, same brief, both for a 2 HP single-phase submersible with twenty stages. One came to ₹64,795, the other to ₹57,300.

Seven and a half thousand rupees apart, for what read on paper like the same thing. We spent two days working out why, and almost all of what we learned was hiding in the parts of the quote that were not prices.

The gap was not the gap

The cheaper quote looked ₹7,495 better. It wasn't — it was much better than that, and for a while we could not see it.

The dearer quote listed a motor at ₹21,400, with a second figure pencilled in the margin: ₹28,400. That second number was the same pump with a copper rotor. The ₹21,400 was the aluminium-rotor version.

The cheaper quote was for a copper-rotor motor at ₹22,500.

So the two quotes were never comparable as printed. Put both on copper and the real comparison is ₹71,795 against ₹57,300 — a gap of ₹14,495, nearly twice what the totals suggested.

Three lines carry almost the whole difference: the motor, the cable and the pipe. Each turned out to be a question about specification rather than price.

Checking the motor against the market

Before accepting that a cheaper motor was a better deal, we went and found what the thing actually sells for.

The equivalent copper-rotor 2 HP, 20-stage Texmo retails at about ₹28,380 including GST, against an MRP of ₹35,000.

That told us two useful things at once. Dealer A's ₹28,400 was exactly market price — a fair quote, not an inflated one. And Dealer B's ₹22,500 was nearly six thousand below street, which is either a genuinely sharp distributor price or a sign that it was not the same motor.

Which is how we ended up reading model numbers off the crates.

What the model numbers actually said

We asked for photographs of the labels. Two units, two codes:

TRF 720 HS – SF015–URC
TE4 620-056  4S015–A2024

They decode, once you know the convention:

Both genuine Texmo. Both 2 HP single phase. The difference between them is the rotor.

The correction we had to make to ourselves

We had been saying "copper motor" and "aluminium motor" all week, and picturing copper versus aluminium windings. That is not what is being sold.

Texmo's stator windings are copper across the range. Poly-wrapped copper wire, in both units. What the URC designation buys you is a copper rotor in place of an aluminium die-cast one.

That is a narrower difference than the phrase "copper motor" implies, and worth knowing before you pay for it. It is also still a real one: a copper rotor has lower resistance, which means less slip, better efficiency, and — the part we care about — a motor that runs cooler. On a pump hanging three hundred feet down a hole that costs money to re-enter, heat is what kills things.

We are paying for the copper rotor. We are no longer under the impression we are paying for copper wire.

The thing that nearly went wrong

Here is the one that matters most, and we nearly missed it.

The TRF label states its stage count plainly: 720 — twenty stages. The TE4 label does not, and the one documented TE4 of comparable power we could find is a ten-stage pump.

Stages are what produce head. For a 2 HP four-inch submersible:

• 20 stages → roughly 114 m maximum head. Our pump sits at 91 m. Fine.
• 10 stages → roughly half of that. It would not lift water out of our well at all.

A ten-stage pump at a twenty-stage price is not a bargain, it is a pump that does not work. We have asked for the metal nameplate on the motor itself — not the crate label — which has to state stages, head range, discharge and the IS 8034 and IS 9283 markings.

If you take one thing from this entry: the stage count is not a detail, and a quote that says "2 HP" has told you almost nothing.

The cable, which is where we disagreed with the cheaper quote

Dealer A quoted 4 sq mm branded cable at ₹197 a metre. Dealer B wrote "2.5/4 sq mm" at ₹136.50 — an ambiguity that is worth more than the price difference.

Our cable run is about 110 m: three hundred feet down the hole, plus the surface run to the panel. A 2 HP single-phase motor pulls roughly 12 amps. Voltage drop over that distance:

A motor fed nine per cent low runs hot, loses torque, draws more current to compensate, and dies early. It is exactly the kind of saving that costs four times what it saved, two summers later, when you are paying to pull three hundred feet of pipe out of a hole.

We are specifying 4 sq mm, and we used the other dealer's unambiguous specification to say so.

The pipe, and a calculation that surprised us

We had asked about a heavier pressure class — 20 kg instead of 16 — on the theory that stronger is better for something that has to hang for a decade and might be reused if the well is ever re-entered. The worry was weight: a thicker wall is more plastic to suspend.

That worry turns out to be wrong, and pleasingly so.

The thicker wall adds about seven kilos of pipe — and narrows the bore enough to hold about seven kilos less water. The total hanging load is the same. Weight is simply not a reason to choose between them.

What decided it was the other direction. The worst pressure the pipe ever sees is the pump's shut-off head, around 12.3 kg/cm² — not the 9 kg/cm² of a static column. Against that, 16 kg gives a 1.3× margin, which is enough. Going to 20 kg buys margin we will never use, and costs about 1.8 m of extra friction head over ninety metres because the bore is narrower. On a well that may already be close to its yield, giving away flow for strength you do not need is a bad trade.

16 kg class it is — but specified properly this time: 40 mm, 16 kg, PE100 grade, ISI marked to IS 4984. Neither original quote stated the grade, and one of them did not state the pressure class or the diameter either.

Who we are buying from, and why

We have gone with Chaithanya Enterprises, trading as Mokshitha Pumps.

Not only because they were cheaper, though they were, by a margin that survived every correction we made. The deciding factor was duller and better: they are an authorised Texmo distributor, listed on Texmo's own dealer network. We checked.

That matters more than usual here, because "Texmo" is a name shared by two different companies. After a family split, Texmo Industries of Coimbatore sells under the Taro brand, while a separate company sells Aqua Texmo. Both have a legitimate claim to the word, and a buyer who only knows the word has no way to tell them apart. Buying from a distributor who appears on the manufacturer's own list removes that question entirely.

The other dealer did nothing wrong. Their copper price was exactly market, their cable specification was the better of the two, and we used it to improve the quote we accepted.

Still being nailed down

• Stage count on the motor, confirmed from the nameplate, in writing
• Cable at 4 sq mm, not 2.5
• Dry-run protection explicitly confirmed on the panel — it was written on one quote and merely implied on the other
• Pipe as PE100, ISI marked
• GST — neither quote showed it, and eighteen per cent on sixty thousand rupees is not a rounding error
• Transport, which one quote left blank

What the two days were worth

Fourteen thousand rupees on the direct comparison, and that is the least of it.

The real return was catching a motor that might have been half the pump we needed, and a cable that would have quietly cooked it. Neither of those was a price. Both were sitting in the specification, where nobody looks, because the total at the bottom of the page is so much easier to read.

Ask what the thing is before you ask what it costs.