Ram Pump Stacked Waste Valves vs Normal Valve

welcome to the land the house youtube channel i'm seth and this is a ram pump it's a water pump that needs no fuel or electricity to operate only flowing and falling water so the typical ram pump is going to have one valve here called the waste valve and that is just going to let the water snap this valve closed cause a pressure wave to go into the pressure tank and lift water uphill somebody sent me an email with a video saying what happens if you add a second waste valve to the first waste valve basically a stacked waste valve so my initial thought is that anytime you increase the height of your waste valve it's going to reduce the head pressure but maybe adding a second valve causes some kind of extra strong waste pressure wave so let's go ahead and test this out and see if having a stacked waste valve causes any change to the ram pump so the setup is going to be i'm going to have about five foot of input head pressure and i'm going to take a garden hose way up the hill to about the 30 foot mark we'll run the pump without the second valve and then we will get a amount of water up top in one minutes time then i'll add the second valve and we'll get the same reading up top to see how much water we have in one minute and that should give us a good idea of if this improves or decreases or stays the same in our test all right let's get to it there's always a plane let me walk you through the setup we have so far now normally you would run a ram pump in a creek or a small river but in this case my river is coming from my ram pump storage tanks way up the hill so what we have is a five gallon bucket with a float valve and a large spider who's about to get a wild ride so we've got the drive pipe is half inch about 20 foot long comes down here to the half inch ram pump using a garden hose as the delivery up the hill i do have the waist valve slightly tilted to the side that helps it to close a little bit easier and so it's going to go up the hill and to my half painted porch up there so right where the hose goes up which is right there is 32 feet above the ram pump down here and so the bucket right here is right at five and a half feet of head pressure so we should have a nice flow rate per minute up top there all right let's get started the first thing i want to do is make sure there's no air in the drive pipe so i'm going to open that water's going to rush down here snap this valve may have a little bit of debris in there yep let me find something just open that for a second i see a leaf or something in there oh yep that's what it was a leaf that's all it takes to uh hold that open so what i'm gonna do now is cycle this valve until it starts working on its own because i've got the delivery closed so i may still have a little air in here as i cycle this it's building pressure in the pressure tank as soon as enough pressure is built it will start cycling on its own okay there we go now the annoying task of the ram pump when you first set it up is filling the delivery pipe up the hill about where this japanese beetle trap is is the amount of back pressure required to keep this thing going so when i open this water rushes through fills this thing to match the source water and then i've got to press this valve down over and over again to push water up the hill until it reaches the point where there's enough back pressure so one little secret you can do is you keep this almost closed and then you cycle this and it will start to introduce enough uh false back pressure to keep this thing going while still allowing you to push water uphill otherwise you're going to push this valve a thousand times spider's not having a very good time took about 15 minutes but i've got the delivery all the way open and the waste valve is clicking away which means we have reached a point where there's enough back pressure pushing down on the pipe to keep everything going so as soon as it starts reaching the top we will do our time test walked up here to the top and the water has now started to flow out as you can see it's not an incredible stream of water but you give that 24 hours and it will add up pretty quick so i'm gonna let this sit for about a minute to make sure it is the full stream and then we will do our test here with a really dirty measuring cup this is what happens when my kids make cakes out of dirt all right it's time to measure this flow rate per one minute with a single valve okay at one minute we have exactly one and a half cups of water with a single valve so let's walk about down to the bottom and add the additional valve and then we will do this test again to see how much water we have in a minute okay let's go ahead and turn off the drive pipe and add this second valve i'm going to make sure that it's oriented in the same tilt as the other one so that it will close easy enough all right there we go we've got a stacked waist valve i sure hope i can replicate the guys results let's see there you go it's wild but it works so you can see there are two valves and they seem to be working hopefully in unison as i walk up this hill for the 100th time today let's make a prediction i think that increasing the height of the waste valve is going to reduce the input head pressure and provide less water at the top so uh i guess we're gonna find out it just seems like having that extra valve isn't gonna do anything we do have output up top that i can see it so it looks less than before okay here we go double waste valve i want to take this time to say that i have ram pumps available at land the house dot com and on amazon links in the description down below i've got half inch three quarter inch one inch and inch and a quarter the one we're using today is the half inch version as you can see the output isn't huge but it definitely will give you something especially if you have a limited source okay here we go three two one and go one cup so it is definitely a reduced flow from before henry where are you henry have you drowned nope nope here you are well it looks like our spider friend has crawled up under here so he was floating around having a good old time climbed up on the ball up here and then up under the float valve so the results are in on the regular setup we had a cup and a half in one minute with the double or stacked waist valve we had just one cup in a minute so we can say that this pretty much proves it's better to have the waste valve as low as possible to have the highest amount of head pressure and one valve is definitely where it's at for providing the most water so i think that is conclusive enough to say that you should definitely just stick with the regular single valve pump thank you so much for watching remember i do have these ram pumps for sale at landahouse.com and on amazon if you have some comments about this test leave those down below and i will see you in the next video you

Channel: Land to House

Views: 12,439

Rating: 4.9160304 out of 5

Keywords: land to house, land two house, ram pump, waste valve, stacked valves, double waste valve, two valves, homemade ram pump, hydraulic ram pump

Id: ll5pvXxx_C4

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 05 2021