Nordstrand 90W Water Pressure Booster Pump

Price: £36 inc VAT (June 2026)

(Model: "etp-w90")

 

We have been looking for a 48V DC pump to pressurise water from out garden water butts to water the garden.

These are difficult to find, aren't cheap and don't seem to be very reliable - the "Good Pump" we bought didn't last very long.

It doesn't help that the battery connetor ingress port is on the top of the pump, and isn't well sealed, so water can get in unless it is adequately protected.

After the 2nd one of these died very qyuickly after the first, I kind of gave up with 48V pumps.

We could have got a 12V pump as there is a lot of choice, but they are also expensive, and I would then need a DC-DC voltage converter, which adds complication to the system.

 

As we now have an inverter near the garden, I thought I would try an AC one instead. This will be less efficient, but hopefully more reliable.

After a brief search of similar-looking models, I chose this one, and bought it new from ebay. They are also available from various other places.

What we received looked slightly different from the web pictures, but it was similar enough that it didn't matter.

Depending on the attachment you have on the end of the hose, the flow rate may be too low to start the pump.

We had this problem when our "gun" was set to a fine jet. We would have to swap the spray mode to "shower" or "soaker" (or disconnect the "gun") so the gravity-fed flow rate would be enought to activate the pump.

This is not too much of a problem, but a sensitivity control would have been nice to fix this problem.

Pros

• Nice and qiuiet - quieter than the 48V and 12V pumps we have bought in the past
• Case and pipe attachments are metal, which should last longer than the plastic ones that all DC ones seem to made out of.
• Works well with a garden watering "gun"
• Instruction sheet  was decent and in multiple languages
• Auto-shut off is great and works with our garden "gun" off mechanism

Cons

• Quite heavy for its size, but this is not a problem, as it will not be moved often
• Power cable is a different length to the On/Off switch, which is annoying when trying to route cables tidily.
• Most of the manufacturer pictures just show 1 cable coming out of the device (the On/Off switch), and not the separate power cable, which is a bit cheeky.
• Switch is only labelled with "I" and "II" for its "On" and "Auto" modes, which isn't very helpful - I stuck cable labels on each side of the switch to say which setting was which position.

Conclusion

We have now used it for more than a week, connected on one side to a tap at the bottom of our rainwater water butts, and the other side to ~30m of 12mm garden hose and then a watering "gun" which has several spray modes.

There is enough pressure to reach what we need to, but as the specification says, it is only 1bar, which is less pressure than a normal UK kitchen tap.

This is not a problem - I did not want to get a pump so powerful that the Hozelock connectors would pop off (which has happened with our more powerful 12 and 48V DC pumps).

We also used it with a rotating sprinkler, which also worked well, although definitely less "throw" than using UK mains water. Again, this is fine, and we probably won't use the sprinkler often as they use so much water.