I have had a bad year so far, at least as far as the water systems go. I had the buried aluminum power line that supplies the 240 to my well house go bad. Apparently it wasn't buried deep enough and when it finally went bad, we hired a locating company to come out and see if they could pinpoint the break on the 700 foot or so run. They located at least 5 bad points in just one leg, so we decided to run a new line from the barn which is only about a 500 foot run over much better terrain. We installed the new line after weeks of waiting for an electrician, borrowing a backhoe from a neighbor to dig the trench, etc, and got the line back up and powering the well. During the month or so, we were down, we used our back-up spring system and when we needed more water, a generator at the well house to run the pump.

Now we are having problems with the reset switch on the well control box popping (red button on the bottom that requires a hard push to reset). The pump is a 1.5 hp pump in a 4" casing (I think) and we had a problem with the reset switch popping twice before the line went down. Now it is popping all the time. Sometimes the pump will run for days without a problem and sometimes it won't run for more than a few minutes.

We had a pump guy come out to help diagnose the problem. He thinks the well control box is fine (he tested it with a spare he had, but the behavior was the same) and he also thinkgs that the power from the generator may have done something to the pump (He wasn't specific what, but mentioned it could also be a bad bearing). He thinks we need to pull the pump and replace it and the total estimate for that is about $3k. I was surprised at how much the estimate was.

So I have a few questions:
1. Does this all sound reasonable? Are there more pieces of information I should gather to help diagnose?

2. Is replacing the pump probably the right thing to do at this point, or are there any other things we can test?

3. Is the $3k price range for replacing a 1.5 hp submersible pump that is about 150 feet down reasonable?

4. Could I pull the pump myself? Is it possible and economical to get a pump rebuilt instead of replaced?

I am not a water guy, although I am somewhat handy. Any suggestions would be appreciated.