Ram Pump Small to Medium Creek Assessment

hi I'm Seth with land the house if you're considering using a ramp pump to pump water off-grid without fuel or electricity but you're not sure if you're small to medium sized Creek is enough to operate a pump I've decided to come out here to my local park and do a site assessment for you to kind of give you an idea of what's required to run at home so let's head down here to the Creek real quick and we will check out the waterway one of the first things I like to consider is the volume and flow rate of the Creek this one has quite a good bit of water in it just judging it eyeball I'm gonna say between 2 and 300 gallons and minutes so quite a good bit of water flowing through here and as you can see it's moving pretty quick so that is important on the half inch ramp pump which I'll be testing out today it only needs 2 gallons per minute to operate so as far as assessing this waterway plenty of water here that brings up one little point flooding if you know that you have a lot of water coming down the mountain then you may want to consider placement of the pump for flooding issues the next thing that we need to understand is head pressure and that's the drop in elevation from where your intake is going to be down to where the pump will be and I'm gonna be using a garden hose to measure this drop in head pressure basically using a water level so let's do that now I've got a regular garden hose here it's about 50 foot long I'm going to be placing one end up the creek and then one down and let the water flow through and I'll be able to lift the lower end up and determine how high it is from the water level to where the water stops coming out of the hose I have the hose laying in the creek pulley and you can see water is coming off this other end I'm just going to lift this up to the point where this water stops flowing so still flowing there and we've stopped light at this point now you can take a tape measure here and measure the height from the water to the top of the hose here and that would give you the head pressure but looking at it just eyeballing on this application I've got about two feet here after you know your head pressure it's important to know how high you're gonna be lifting water for this application I'm just going to go from the creek up out of the water and just attach to dispense the ramp pump operates on a 1 to 7 ratio typically for every 1 foot of head pressure you get seven feet of lift out now if you need to know more about back pressure I have a video on that link in the description down below I'm gonna be using PVC as my drive pipe and I only have 25 feet of it here I highly recommend that you use 25 feet or more for the RAM pump as it will allow the cycle time to be slower and provide more pressure my intake is just a PVC pipe in the water now for a install that's going to be permanent you would definitely want to have a screen over that intake just to prevent rocks and sand from getting into that pipe so 25 feet later let me show you the amount of water that is coming out of this pipe and we can also lift this up to show the head pressure we're going to be working with so you can see the amount of flow that's coming out and our head pressure it's right around there looks like a foot now this is a bare minimum for getting the pump to start I'm gonna unscrew the Union here that has a ball valve on it and that way I can now ramp um so you can buy atlanta house comm threaded ends on the ball valve and back is really LP to close the valve off and stop the water if you need now I'm just going to reattach notice how water pours out of the waste valve but it never closes that's because there's not enough head pressure in this short 25 foot section of the creek what I'm going to do is move up to this other waterfall right here and that should supply enough drop to get the pump going [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] increasing the headcrusher by just a couple of inches has given this pump enough to operate when I open the drive pipe valve I can then push this check valve and the water pressure will close the valve after it poses for a while they will build enough pressure in the tape that I'll be able to pump water up till now it's time to install the delivery pipes which will go out of the creep up the hill I'm just going to use a garden hose for this now whenever I open this delivery pipe valve the pump is going to stop okay the reason for that is because pressure has been lost in the tank and there's no back pressure pushing down on the valve to remedy that I need to build back pressure in my delivery pipe so I'm just going to purge this valve several times until it fills my pipe with water and the pump is now running with the delivery pipe open and the pipe installed comes up this little tiny hill and over to my fence now is a good time to talk about the ratio of head pressure to lift so as you've got about 1/2 feet coming down to the pump and we've got somewhere around six feet of lift out here which means we should be able to get some water out put it there it just may take a while now if I were to increase the head pressure from one and a half feet by extending the drive pipe way down to the other end of the creek I'd say I had two and a half to three feet of head pressure we would get a lot more volume out at the top but there is a point where if you have too much head pressure you're gonna run into back pressure issues where more pressure is being built at the pump than the delivery pipe can push back down and so the pump will stop keep that in mind when you're trying to figure out the volume you want at the top just noticed that water has started to flow out of the delivery pipe here and as you can see that is not much water somewhere around probably a quarter gallon in in an hour but it is definitely a proof of concept we're taking water from right down there bringing it even further down and yet bringing it six feet out of the creek to this point over here I hope this a small to medium sized Creek assessment has helped I'm going to be making a few more of these to kind of get different ideas on setups that may affect your Creek so I think in the next video I will be installing a much longer drive pipe on a different Creek to show you the difference in the amount of water Al's thank you so much for watching this ramp up video if you found it helpful please hit that thumbs up and be sure to click the subscribe button and ring the notification Bell I have close to a hundred videos on the RAM pump now here on land the house and do remember I have four different sizes available for sale at both Landa house comm and on Amazon I'll have both of those links in the description down below thanks for watching and I will see you next time

Channel: Land to House

Views: 30,263

Rating: 4.9410896 out of 5

Keywords: land to house, land two house, ram pump, hydrostatic pressure, head pressure, site assessment, water, creek, ram, pump, stream, will a ram pump work, hydraulic ram pump, install, how to install, off grid, green, energy, free energy, homestead, water pump, homemade ram pump, hydraulic ram, diy ram pump, ram pumps, ram pump design, how to build a ram pump, free energy water pump, mini ram pump, water ram, ram pump plans, small ram pump

Id: 7E7f_K0vz5U

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019