Pumping Water Off Grid - Building A Hydraulic Ram Pump & How it Works

guys Josh from the redneck homestead Channel I'm here at the main house in my workshop and we're going to be going through a new project that we're going to be bringing up to the off-grid cabin so many of you have made comments remarks suggestions about the use of a hydraulic ram pump at the off-grid cabin for tapping the spring and pumping water to different places on the property and although I haven't really remarked back too much on those comments because I've had so many things going on and I really haven't devoted a lot of focus to that project in recent moving past a couple of weeks I am doing a hydraulic ram pump project and we are going to assemble that Ram pump right now now for starters I just have to say thank you and a big shout out to my friend Mike Collinson who has some great videos on RAM pumping and for engine to engineer 775 who has an amazing series on hydraulic ram pumping as well as Joshua Burks out of all of the videos I've seen I have learned a tremendous amount just about the details the theory of RAM pumping is is actually quite straightforward and quite simple from a physics perspective but when it comes down to the details the ratios in pipe sizes and the you know the amount of elevation drop between your drive pipe and your RAM pump and then how much head you can achieve in pumping the water to another location I have made a decision to go with a perfect two to one ratio and pipe sizes my drive pipes an inch and a half and then my my water supply pipe I guess you might call it or my output pipe is going to be 3/4 so why don't I show you what I have for fittings and we're going to go ahead and start assembling this thing many people have said in their videos that you can build a ram pump you know with fittings purchase online for about a hundred bucks I don't think that's possible or at least in the sizes that I'm using I found that the local plumbing supply we have a company up here in the Northeast called FW web and they're a wholesaler and I have an account with them and they're they're good company very good company and they have everything you could possibly imagine and unfortunately is going to cost you big big bucks to buy from them I found that I needed to pick and choose what I bought from them and what I bought online in a while I would prefer to deal with a real person and buy from a brick and mortar outfit sometimes it just doesn't make sense for example the plumbing house sells these inch and a half swing check valves brass for 67 dollars a piece I need two of them I got these for 21 dollars on Amazon so I was at the supply house and the guy said yeah well you're buying the cheap imported ones I turned the the valve over there the check valve over and it's at Taiwan on it these are made and I think China or it doesn't matter where they're made they're brass they're um the tolerances are exactly where they need them to be and I'm going to try my luck and save 7060 six percent or so on these cheap Chinese ones this valve here it's an inch and a half ball valve at the supply house was big bucks it was thirty seven dollars they said well you know the let this is lead-free and this and that of course you can see my made in China here well to buy this thing on Amazon I think I paid seventeen bucks for it so to me that distinction in price is clear I have to buy certain expensive things online because it just doesn't make sense remember guys and you know this as I've said it a thousand times I'm not doing any of this to make any money I'm not in this for profit I'm in this this is all hobby stuff for me so yeah I'm improving my property and yeah I'm having a blast doing it and yeah I'm providing some recreation and some learning but you know it just makes sense to cut some corners where it makes the most sense now these unions same story these were like cinch and a half Union was like six bucks on the amazon and it was 20 bucks at the supply house um I think I bought this at the supply house just because it made sense whatever but anyways let's just kind of go through a real rough inventory the first thing is I got some double thickness tape here I got several rolls of it that I bought at Lowe's at a really good deal I don't know a couple years ago so I'm going to be using that for the larger fittings and we'll use some white thread tape single thickness thread tape for the smaller fittings but so that's that got a pressure gauge here we want to be able to see what our output pressure is after we pump the water we want to know what kind of delivery pressures we got um these are a couple of unions the input union is inch and a half the outputs three-quarter for that perfect two to one ratio two two on the input one on the output we need to swing check valves inch and a half one is going to be providing the ramming effect the other one is going to be providing the one-way check of the water so it doesn't flow backwards we need an input valve to start and stop the supply of water from the spring head or from the kinetic water source and that is engine half and then we have the output shutoff valve which is 3/4 now this assembly right here these are just some fittings that are going to be necessary to install the pressure gage I've got a ninety degree three-quarter elbow I've got a 3-way tee all at three quarters on each on each output we've got a bushing inch and a half to three quarter to read Douce after we pump the water we need to reduce down to 3/4 I'll excuse me after we accept the input from the drive pipe and make it past the check valve we need to reduce here this here in my hand I picked it up because it's really not entirely relevant to the RAM pump but I just grabbed this this is it for our garden hose if I wanted to just quickly connect the garden hose to the output of the RAM pump this fitting will do that I have two 3-way teas that are inch and a half on all of the and all the points we have a whole host of 3/4 and inch and a half nipples to connect all the all the pieces together then we have some miscellaneous PVC the this is three inch and this is a three inch 2 inch and a half and then this here is an inch and a half thread to weld and of course we need the pipe for that which I have in the other room and some of the other pipe is in the basement of one of the other properties so I got to grab that but we're not going to get to that right now and I'll explain what that's for when we get to it again I want to really thank engineer 775 Mike Collinson and Joshua Burks for their great videos and for all of the the enjoyment and the education that I've gotten from all three of you guys so thanks a lot and I've gotten to know Mike through YouTube over the last year and what a great guy so thumbs up to you man arm hope I can keep my ram pump going as long as you have actually I hope I can get it going let's start with that we'll get it going first and then we'll see if we can have a competition to see you can run there's longer um I have adopted kind of a hybrid of all three designs favouring I think the simplicity and the modularity of engineer 775 his pump arm has substantially more piece or significantly more pieces than other pumps that I've seen but there are reasons and engineer 775 goes into explicit and just painful detail about some of the physics and the mathematics that go into RAM pumping or behind Ram pumping so I would say you should really check engineer 775 s videos there's no sense in doing in reinventing the wheel or in this case reinventing the pump by creating videos that explain all the science and I am definitely a science head I love the love physics actually my dad was a physics professor for almost 50 years so I kind of grew up loving the sciences and mathematics and of course being a software guy you know problem-solving with math and those types of things is I guess in my blood but I'm not here to do that I'm here to get away from that and to just do the stuff that gets my hands dirty once in a while so let's put this thing together I'm gonna do a dry fit first before I wind this up with tape and we will then take the whole thing apart and tape it up and torque it down and make sure everything is holding water all right so that's what it looks like fully assembled again I've not thread taped anything and it's not torque down so it's very loose but this is what it's going to look like when it's finished and I'm not going to bore you with the process of taking it apart taping it and then the finished assembly but let's go through all the parts real quick so we have a union first F and this is the drive pipe here this is where the water supply is going to come in so in our case we have a spring and we're going to drop the spring into a cistern and then we're going to pipe the drive pipe to the base of the system cistern and then drop it six to ten vertical feet over a length of about 25 to 40 feet depending on the terrain when I actually get there see see if we can actually get it to around 40 feet and it's going to supply it's going to plug right in here to the Union and then of course we have the valve to turn the water on to the system or turn it off then what happens is the water comes in and has to go up here first okay after the system has been primed and started the water will have nowhere to go but up now you'll notice here that this swing check valve otherwise known as a flap valve it is oriented with a flap down you can always tell what direction the water flow is supposed to go by the arrow that's on the side of the valve in this case it's pointing down so you might ask well why are you pointing it down isn't that going the wrong way well no not in this case the first swing check flap valve needs to go down the theory is this once the pump has been primed and started we need to create a ramming effect a hammering effect with the water so as the water is supplied the water is going to travel up here and when there's a time of lower pressure the water is going to escape until the water pressure builds up enough and it shuts the valve once that flapper is shut it's going to hammer or force the water down and along the system further through this swing check valve which you can see is pointing in the correct direction so then if you can imagine the flap in here swings this way and never comes back past vertical the water gets hammered through this valve here opens the valve allows some water through and forces it along through the system now as the water is forced through the system it reaches this tea here now this tea I don't have completed yet but what we're going to be doing is installing a for lack of a better term a pressure tank it would be an expansion tank on your heating system otherwise known as a pressure vessel of some sort now there are a lot of different designs and I could go to Lowe's or to the supply house and simply buy a pressure tank but they're 80 bucks to start with number one and number two they rust like crazy and this thing is going to be out of the woods you've seen the woods you know where it's going and I don't particularly want to have to attend to this thing when it rusts and decays over time so what we're going to do is take a piece of three inch PVC pipe about two two and a half feet long it's going to sit up about this high and I'm going to fill it with this bicycle inner tube that I have in this bag which I bought at savers which is this kind of like a Goodwill second-hand shop it just happened to be sitting there and it was like two bucks for it so I grabbed it like wow that's perfect - perfect timing you fill that about halfway and it creates kind of like a negative pressure effect on the water as the water fills the pressure tank the balloon or the bicycle tube wants to continue to maintain its full inflated in full natural state so it's forcing itself back down which is pushing the water with the help of the pressure that's coming from this direction it pushes it into this pipe that is only three-quarters of an inch so what we want to do is we don't care necessarily about maintaining the same flow rate we want to increase the pressure and that's why we reduce the size of the pipe because when you reduce the pipe the same amount of water is going to be coming through here it's just going to slow the flow down and I don't have all the calculations done it's going to slow the flow but it's going to do so at a much higher pressure and it's kind of like take a garden hose open the spicket all the way up and you've got a quite a bit of flow coming out your garden hose and then you kink the garden hose slightly you increase the pressure you've all put your finger on the edge on the end of a garden hose and that increases the pressure if you want to get some mud off your car or your truck you just put your finger over the edge of it all that's doing is restricting the flow out the output flow while the input flow remains the same well that's essentially what we're doing here and because we want to measure the pressure just for purposes of understanding what we can do with the water before it actually gets there I've installed this little um pressure gage on camera there we go it's focusing I couldn't find one that registered less than a hundred pounds I don't expect to ever get more than 40 pounds to be honest with you although I haven't tested this particular Ram pump so I don't know what the flow is going to look see the pressure is going to look like I anticipate it's not going to be anywhere near um 40 and probably no less than 20 25 that's my hope 525 pounds of pressure I can do all the work I need to do with water on at that property for the foreseeable future so continuing along after the pressure is registered and of course there is some economic overhead and I don't mean financial economic but the economy of the system here you lose some economy in all of these different fittings in distances and 90's when your water needs to travel a ninety yeah it's diverting and there is some economic impact there but not enough to deter us from making these these sort of judgment calls here there's very little impact in putting a pressure gauge you can see that's pretty pretty loose just sitting there finally we get to or almost finally we get to the output shutoff valve which is instrumental in starting the system and I'll explain why in just a minute then after we get this thing pumping it's going to send the water out through this union and right now I've just loosely installed this garden hose adapter one thing I realize now that I didn't mention you absolutely need all brass or combination of brass and galvanized do not use black pipe it's going to rust like crazy it's going to rust fast especially for an outside environment harsh environment like we are on summer can be a little more forgiving but just the humidity alone will rust the heck out of your black pipe don't use it it's a waste of your money and it's a waste of your time spend a little extra get the galvanized which really isn't that much more money and and or all brass fittings Brett as you can see I didn't go all brass it's too much money and but that said good luck I hope you try this project I will keep you posted with the next step and hopefully we'll be cooking with water soon if you liked this video I would appreciate it very much if you'd give me a thumbs up and if you haven't already subscribed to this crazy adventure I would appreciate if you'd hit that subscribe button right now we are just crossing into 3,500 subscribers which is just unbelievable to me it's remarkable I can't believe it actually um you know there are some channels that are stalled at a few hundred or a thousand or whatever and we just keep chugging along and there are other channels that are going crazy but what's so very interesting to me is that I look at the number of views that our channel is gotten and we've gotten over a third of a million views at this point which I can't believe a third of a million people I mean that's like a a decent sized City in New Hampshire actually the biggest city in New Hampshire is only like a hundred thousand people so take three of those and have them all watch one of our videos that's how many views we've gotten and we're growing like crazy not that our goal is to grow this thing but it's nice to reach more people and we hope we're reaching you and that you enjoy some of the content that we're putting out and that's about all I got for you today we'll we'll be in touch thanks the next video all right friends this is the finished hydraulic ram pump ready to roll it's all taped up torqued down and ready for connections so thank you so much for taking the time to watch this stay tuned for the next video when we go and set this thing up

Channel: Airspeed Adventures

Views: 184,886

Rating: 4.7279935 out of 5

Keywords: self sufficiency, off grid, homestead, homesteading, New Hampshire, hydraulic ram pump, tapping a spring for water, pumping water off grid

Id: WazUKOAJDZ4

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2015