How To Build A Ram Pump

[Applause] welcome this is a video on how to build a ram pump the sites that it can best be used in is a flowing creek or spring water flowing downhill ideally your supply of water would be flowing down a relatively steep hill so you don't have to pipe your water as far to get enough elevation change to drive a ramp in this case to get about five feet of elevation drop to drive a ramp i'd have to run a collection pipe from up there to bucket about 25 feet from the pump so the supply of water would be falling five feet over about 25 feet of distance so just to be clear you do need freely flowing water to make this work very quickly this is everything that you need for a ram pump setup the most critical being a supply of water now this is a trickle coming out of the spring that i have right now you would need more water than that to run a ram pump so we have the water supply that will go into bucket which will go into the drive hose which will go into the ram pump kit which will then go through the delivery pipe to where you want the water now this is a kit that i sell but you can obtain all of the components yourself too in here we have parts for the air chamber this is a cap and an air bladder here's the other parts for the air chamber and of course they're not all packaged the same they might come differently these are swing check valves and some on off valves a little bit of plumber's tape and here's your air chamber inside it our two t's and then some pipe nipples the first thing you want to do is prep all of your pipe nipples with some teflon tape included in the kit so the proper way to do that hold it so it's going away from you like that hold it with your thumb and go around just like that five times all right that's one ready to go i'm gonna do the other five the first step will be the inlet valve which then goes to a t for the most part these can just be screwed together by hand you may need a wrench to get it the last little bit there we go one more pipe nipple now the key to this is the swing check valve which has a flapper inside it and we want to attach it in this manner so that when water flows up the flapper shuts so the air on this will point down again just finish it up with a wrench [Music] and another nipple and the other swing check valve oriented with the arrow pointing towards the delivery side and another nipple and the other tee another nipple and the final valve and another nipple here and that's where the pressure tank will screw on so now we have to assemble that to assemble the pressure tank you will need cement i recommend the all-purpose cement with primer i'm primering all pieces so i only have to do this step once [Music] now assemble the pvc pieces i'm going to put it on and rotate if you can wow that's really stuck on there good so the further that rotated now we need to stuff the air bladder into the buffer tank just kind of folding it in half and shoving it in make sure that the valve stem stays out at the top you don't need an air compressor or a pump or anything to inflate this you have to take a screwdriver and press down on the tip of the schrader valve stick it in your mouth and inflate it so there it is inflated ready to go now replace the schrader valve cap i'm just gonna tuck that in some and then apply teflon tape to the threads and then screw the cap on a large set of channel locks helps with this step and now we can install the buffer tank onto the pump just by screwing it in and so that's how the pump comes from my kit i'm also going to install an outlet male garden hose thread adapter on the outlet of course i have to put teflon tape on these and then also i have this inlet for half inch pvc and a union this is not included in my kit you can get these pretty much anywhere and this will allow easy separation of the ram pump for service if it's needed next up i need to prepare the supply bucket for a bulkhead fitting of course doing it over a box so that i don't get anything in the grout [Music] and here it is all assembled okay here's the first startup i have the valve down at the bottom closed this is spring water from a tank that i have so first we're going to fill up the drive pipe and let it finish bubbling out the air okay all the air is out i'm gonna put this back in with a trickle just to keep some water in there i do expect once we get it running that i'll have to open those up more so from the bucket it goes through 30 feet of half inch drive pipe you can use a normal coupler but in my case i've used threaded fittings because i'll be using this setup to test various lengths of drive pipe so i need to disassemble it and add pieces as needed and back down here at the pump we do have a supply of water ready to go first thing i'll do is open up the delivery because we want to pre-fill that with the static water pressure that's in the drive pipe okay it should be full now oh there it goes almost there we go so it looks like i've already got water flowing out up here the water flowing out here is maybe about double the height of that the camera flattens everything i can come over here my chicken coop there is level so we can get a better visual representation of the slope involved with my setup and i do recommend it be approximately similar to that although it seems we may have run out of water already yep she's thirsty so this is another way to purge just allowing the valve to stay open in fact having a a stick there to keep it pressed down is a good way to purge all the air out of the line okay it seems like all the air is perched out well i hope that was helpful uh i'm on somebody else's creek here i don't know who it's just off the side of the road i don't have enough water flowing in my house to operate this so for a good background i'm here so just a reminder a parts list to build this yourself is in the description including amazon and ebay links and whatever links may be relevant and of course a link to my current ebay listing for this pump i do plan on having different sizes available in the future larger pumps this is a half inch pump as small as they go basically and i also hope to have an amazon listing shortly and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss future videos goodbye my feet are completely numb

Channel: Joe Malovich

Views: 164,986

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Id: n_tcz1HHiVk

Length: 9min 49sec (589 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021