Start the Ram Pump for 2021

welcome to land to house i'm seth for eight years now i have been working with the hydraulic ram pump to take water from the creek up to some storage tanks i water my garden with that and also do a lot of ram pump testing well in 2021 it is time to get this system up and running again every other week it seems like it drops down into the 30s again but i think we are out of the freeze so i can get this going again speaking of that i am really bad at winterizing my system i haven't done it in eight years so let's step down here to the creek take a look at the ram pump and see if anything has busted over this past winter this is the pump itself it looks like it is pretty well covered in leaves but that's no big deal oh that's some cold water i got up to about 45 today so it's uh a bit chilly now i'll show you what a ram pump looks like here in a bit this one is covered up with a bunch of junk so i can't really show you what this one looks like one of the things that saves my pump from dying every year is that i leave the delivery valve open and water passes through here and one of my hose clamps is not on the pipe and so it breaks free and drains the system for me and it happened again this year so this right here is supposed to be connected to that but it's not so i think that's what saves me from having busted pipes throughout the winter time but as you can see there's no water getting to the pump which means something may be busted on the drive pipe or further up but for the time being this all looks acceptable we can probably go ahead and drain out the tank here let's see if it'll do it yeah maybe yep i see some bubbles in there we'll let that do its thing for a bit come with me up here so the drive pipe is connected to this old flume which really locks it down tight oh here's the nettle forest that's always fun to walk through so far the drive pipe is intact let's see what we got up here so this bucket is what i like to refer to as the filter bucket it will essentially help reduce the sediment and silt but also provides an air free source to the pump so air that gets into this drive line will stop the pump and that's what's uh this bucket is mostly doing so i'm already seeing a lot of silt in there but also yeah my supply line which brings water from the intake up here has come loose so we'll have to reattach that let's continue following the supply line up to the intake filter we've had some pretty decent floods this creek gets up to about 400 gallons a minute from the 50 or so that it is right now this tree fell maybe two weeks ago i'm glad i wasn't standing under it okay so you can't tell but this little piece of pvc right there is the intake screen so i've got a shovel we will dig all that out and get water flowing so let's do that first i'm gonna start scooping some of this sediment out of [Applause] here probably going to go faster if i remove a few of these rocks i can already see bubbles where water is getting pulled into that pipe so this is basically two three inch pipes with window screen around them and that lets water go into the pipe and down this uh one inch poly pipe so let's go follow that back down to the bucket and see if we have water down here at the bucket i've got this pipe and i can see there's some flow but not enough so what we can do is lift this up for a bit and water will fill the pipe and then we can set it down quickly and it will help pull that water out quicker basically there's an air lock and we have to get rid of that air lock so if you pick the pipe up hold it for a second it lets the water fill up and drop it it helps pull that air out i'm also seeing discolored water so that means we've got to let some of that silt out of there too so see how it's not quite a full flow so you pick it up let it fill with water for a second and then drop it and that will get us going here in just a bit so let's let that flow and we will see the full pipe here in just a minute okay that's pretty much a full pipe's worth there may still be a little air in there but we're looking pretty good to get this water into the bucket i've got this right here basically just angles it down there we go there's a lot of leftover silt from last year's ram pump use and i've just got a drain plug open down here letting all of that out so you can see i've got about three or four inches of silt catchment before it hits the drive pipe intake [Applause] my kids would love to stir this soup now i have the bucket clean of silt and the outlet is still open i've just got a regular cap here that i put over the end and that will fill the bucket up once it reaches that drive pipe the water will start going in there and filling up the ram pump so as that does its thing oh and also when the water reaches this level right here it will spill over and go into the flume so that air will just continue to burp out and that will be all we need for this go ahead and put our lid back on with our rock there we go now let's go down here and see what's happening at the ram pump almost all the air has been pulled out of the drive pipe which means it's time to close this tank valve here okay and now we can push down the waste valve which has closed and that will basically put pressure in here so let me go ahead and close the delivery valve going up the hill it won't take but a few cycles for the water to raise up into this tank and it will start cycling on its own there you go pretty quick so a lot of pressure is building up in this tank when i open this delivery it's going to shoot the water out the delivery pipe and the pump will stop the reason that happened is because our delivery pipe is disconnected up here and there's not enough pressure pushing back down on the pump to keep it going so let's go connect that real quick there may be more than one place where this has happened we'll have to walk the line here in a bit and see but for the meantime i'm just going to push this together okay i'm going to open the delivery pipe up again water is going to go from the drive pipe through the delivery pipe passing the pump and it's going to fill the delivery all the way up until it matches the source water so after that's been done i'm going to take a stick and start pushing the valve to let it cycle water through now it's going to take a little while to do this because the water is being pushed up the delivery pipe until a point that it has enough back pressure on the pump to start operating on its own as i'm cycling this valve it's probably a good time to mention that i've worked with these pumps now for about eight years and i have them for sale on the land the house.com website also on ebay and amazon links in the description down below so if you need to water your garden or livestock you may want to check these pumps out they are quite handy i get a lot of questions saying uh in the past you used a brass valve and then you swapped over to these stainless steel valves and now you're back to brass why is that the stainless steel valves last a lot longer but the problem is they're a lot heavier and so especially for the half inch pump you had to tilt the valve to the side if you had two three or four feet of head pressure if you had more than that it was enough to get the valve running we're almost there um so i reduced back down to the brass valves which you can still get two or three years out of and they work on as little as two feet of head pressure so much better to have a much wider range of head pressures than these old heavy valves all right so that right there if no debris gets into the system and no air gets into the system we'll run 24 7 all the time until you stop it so let's see how far this delivery is going up the hill from this distance you can tell why they call it a ram pump the ram pump is right in here and the delivery pipe circles around and is this three-quarter inch pipe here it comes around goes under my little bridge goes under a culvert which needs to be dug out right here goes up under the road [Applause] to this spot right over here and then heads up the hill here and we're going to go up past the cars up on that hill up there so the pipe continues along the road here in the ditch now one thing that did not fare well over the winter time is this connection here so basically we've got look ram pump has already made it up to this point here so there's our water going up we got to find this connection right here and reconnect that but this right here is what we need to fix so basically the water uh snapped that off in the winter time i'm not even sure where it went it probably flew off pretty good and there's also another spot over here in the garden that has busted i have not been up to the tank since last year so we'll have to see if everything is still functioning up there okay i brought a wrench so hopefully we can get this back up and running these eggs are known for loosening up over the winter time delivery pipe goes under this culvert which goes up under our little driveway here to the other side [Applause] you'll see there are now two lines one is going back down the hill and one's going up the hill now one thing that's kind of fun is you can tap on the line empty empty so in just a second when the water gets up here we'll be able to hear that the water is at this point now the water's reached this point so it's still empty full you can actually walk up along this and do that same thing to find out where the water has made it to so it seems to be water right here it's right around here is where it's gotten to so i'll meet you up here at the tanks and we will wait for the water the weight of the water in this delivery pipe is pretty heavy and so i've installed this board with some plumber's strap and a fence post right there and that prevents the whole thing from sliding back down the hill we're still empty at this point so here are my water storage tower tanks so basically i have constructed this little makeshift tower not 100 necessary but it gets things up a little bit higher but it has worked out well so each of these is 55 gallons so i've got a little over 150 gallons here now what freaks out a lot of people is that the line comes in goes around right there and then feeds from the bottom and a lot of people think there's no way you can fill a storage tank from the bottom so here's the deal the size of the delivery pipe doesn't matter you could be lifting this same water up with a four inch pipe or a half inch pipe it doesn't matter the gravity or pressure down on any i guess cross cross-section of that water is the same whether it's a big body of water or a little body of water so that being the case whenever this little pipe comes up and starts filling these tanks any point in this is going to be the same so let's say i took this pipe and brought it up into the top it would be the same pressure getting up to the top as it is here at the bottom the difference is the time it takes to fill so if i'm feeling from right here on up this is the pressure that's pushing down as it fills if i'm feeling from the top it has to push down from the top the whole time so it's just having to push that much higher before it spills in the top that being said it can be easier to go from the top because if your source is from the bottom you have to have a valve otherwise it will basically drain back down if the system stops so i've got the valve here it's only in one direction so as soon as the water starts filling this it can't go back down the delivery pipe only this line here anyway a lot to be said you can feel from the top or the bottom it doesn't matter let's see how far up we are here not there yet yep we're here oops my tools not there there all right we're close see if i can open this old valve here a little bit of junk in there a product called unisil is what i use to connect all of these tanks it's a little rubber grommet and it makes the installation easy because you don't have to access the inside of the tank you can just reach right there and push that in oh this is the only one all right we're right there not yet all right we're right around here i open this just so you can see that the water does come out of there we have water so my setup has seven feet of head pressure and 35 foot of lift typically the ram pump is going to work on a one to seven ratio so for every one foot of fall into the pump you can expect seven lift out and you always want to bring your final tanks a little bit below that max number so that you have flow rate at the top now for a secret if you use pvc for your drive pipe instead of the black roll pipe you can get a better ratio it's closer to one to eight so keep that in mind whenever you do your own install so that seems to be clearing up a bit if i close this off it'll only take a moment for that little piece there to fill and it'll start going back down the hill now of course those pieces are busted down there so we'll have to fix those i'll have to go buy those parts to get that done we can at least go see the water rolling back down the hill so once again here's one of the places we have to fix but you'll notice that a line comes off lower than that point and goes underground here and that is what i use to water the garden so let's go over here and that pipe is maybe four or five inches under the ground here you can't see it anymore where it's been and this is where it's going right here let's step inside real quick obviously i'm not a very good gardener but uh maybe one day so this right here is probably filling up i had this uh filter on here and had just a uh a simple uh i guess it was a a 90 right there so i have to replace that looks like oh i see the water coming out now check it out this is busted down here and so it's just simply dripping out and going on down so that's the water from the ram pump so there's a line that goes uh here underground over to a really cool sprinkler called a wobbler and the water shoots up and hits this little jet right in here and it wobbles and can spray water this entire garden area here and it waters everything quite well yeah pressure's really picking up now whenever those tanks are full at the top and i have 150 gallons of water it will put lots of pressure at this little sprinkler and it will water everything for several hours here's an example of an old ram pump i've got except it's missing a union that i typically put on this side that would look kind of like that so how does a ram pump work you've got a drive pipe side which is right here and that's where your pipe is coming down the creek it needs to have water that's flowing and falling the fall is called head pressure and it's very important to the pumps operation so the water falls down into the pump and causes this to snap closed the reason it does that is because water tries to find level and so since you've got water coming downhill it comes out here and tries to go up there to find level well when that valve snaps closed it's got just a typical swing valve in there the water tries to go somewhere and what happens is a pressure wave or water hammer effect is created it's pops closed the water has got that energy is trying to go somewhere so one wave is sent back up the pipe another wave is sent into this secondary inline valve so the water is hammered into here and it tries to go somewhere again some of it goes into the pressure tank creating pressure in that and some of it is sent up and out and this is where it goes uphill so the concept is the pressure that is built inside of this tank that is based on the head pressure slam over here will equalize with what's going out the delivery so if you have the potential for 30 psi in here then the weight of the water coming on this pipe here will match that 30. so basically if you have this slightly less than the pressure in that then you will pump water uphill all right that concludes the ram pump startup of 2021 i think i have four or five of these videos out now because i started up every year if you're not familiar with the channel i do a lot of ram pump testing well over 100 videos on different concepts with this kind of pump so be sure to subscribe and if you haven't already like button and leave me a comment down below and i would like to hear your thoughts on the ram pump so like i said before i use this water to do my testing with so i don't have to run the well and then i also water my little garden over here but it's great for gardens or livestock or filling up a pond for fish whatever you need water up a hill for thanks for watching and i will see you in the next video bye you

Channel: Land to House

Views: 28,553

Rating: 4.9363732 out of 5

Keywords: land to house, land two house, ram pump, start a ram pump, starting a ram pump, ram pump 2021, hydrauilc ram pump, winter ram pump

Id: H4e6-tu0g24

Length: 22min 42sec (1362 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021