Start Up the Ram Pump for 2020

hey I'm Seth Johnson with land the house thank you so much for joining in today I'm gonna be starting up the hydraulic ram pump series for 2020 if you're not familiar with the hydraulic ram pump it is a water pump that requires no fuel or electricity to operate only flowing falling water so let me show you the state of my ram pump here in the creek now if you're wondering why I have one of these it's to water my garden and also to do lots of RAM pump testing this summer I've got 34 video ideas written down so far for the RAM pump so let me show you what it looks like and we're going to be getting this thing up and running and cleaned up because I left it out in here in the creek all winter long and it got pretty trashed so let's take a look at it first of all here's the pump itself you can see there are some racket balls floating in tank here those were my last tests that we're done we'll be cleaning that out and putting a bicycle tube back in there need to clean up all the debris around here and also if you follow the delivery pipe it's this half-inch poly that goes up here it came loose during the winter time and has been flowing non-stop here into this little puddle for the entire winter so you can see the output right there so I'm going to attach this back to the other side over there now let's walk up here to the bucket in take the bucket published be wearing shoes but I've got sandals on okay so yeah the delivery pipe goes up that way the RAM pump needs to be cleaned out we'll be following the drive pipe up here and that goes up to a bucket which does two things it allows a air free intake and also catches a good bit of sediment and silt so you can see my drive pipe comes out here about four to six inches above the bottom and that catches silt I have a feeling we've caught silt up to here which is a lot feeding into this bucket is water from up the creek again the flow is too low we're gonna have to go clean that out I've also got a little extra look at all that silt I've got an extension piece that will bring this down into the bucket so it won't have all this air bubble issue that's going on okay so let's follow this up the creek here and I'll show you what the intake looks like we will also have to clean that out see how cold this March water is yep it's pretty cold so ideally I would have a larger pipe than a one-inch feeding a one-inch pump but that's what I've got currently let's see where is our intake okay the intake is under all of this sediment and silt right here so you can see right there it goes into that so we've got a lot of work to do to clean this out as well after we get all this cleaned up down here we'll head up to the top of the hill and work on our tanks and see what the pressure is down at the garden I want to know I've got a pressure gauge that I'll be using to see how much drop we have because I've got some fun ideas for garden watering this summer okay I brought a shovel down here it's going to see if I can throw some of this silt out of the way so we can access the pump [Applause] okay you might not be able to see much of a difference but I've cleaned out a good bit around the pump we'll wait for some of this silty water to settle and I'll show you that a little bit closer but let's go ahead and walk up here to our bucket and work on that next so water comes in from up the stream through this pipe here goes in here and deposits silt and the drive pipe pulls an air free water out to the pump and this 90 here takes the excess water and puts it into the flume but I'm thinking if they're going to be easier to clean this out when there's water in here so let's actually move up the creek even more and clean that out first I'm pretty much standing on the intake which means it's pretty dirty so I'm just going to start off by cleaning up these sticks that are here [Applause] okay and then I guess I will just begin digging this out here [Applause] we've had a whole bunch of rain this winter so far and it is definitely piled up a lot of silt I have several rocks stacked up here that kind of make a little dam I'm going to pull those aside and hopefully it'll wash a lot of this silt out of here [Applause] okay starting to see these pretty good I think we go ahead and pull them up and try to dig out a little bit under them and also get the silt and stuff that's stuck into that screen now I'm going to put these rocks back here to bring this little dam back up and we should be good to go for a while on this one [Applause] and there we have it the intake is now clean enough and we've got a little rock dam here to keep the water in that should be more than enough to get us going for the next couple of weeks now that have the intake clean it's time to get this flowing at full capacity so I'm gonna pick this up to where it stops flowing let the water build up for a second and then drop it down here to the ground and let it hold the siphon there's also gonna be a bunch of air in here well that's pulling a siphon I've got this old ball valve that's busted I thought it would be great to extend this here so go ahead and put this on here what was happening was bubbles were entering into the system through this right here and it was really causing all right that's the flow rate I was trying to find there so I let this fill the bucket but down here on the bottom I have got a drain plug that I'm gonna pull and hopefully be able to get this thing drain here we go that'll help out okay we have success the bucket is now clean now you can see a lot of air is bubbling out of that drive pipe we have to work with that here in a bit but I like this I think that extension on the supply line is going to help not to introduce those bubbles in there I guess we'll find out here in just a bit let's let it cover up there yeah see the bubbles are much reduced so that's perfect just we were going for cool all right before we can get the pump started we need to reconnect this delivery line that goes up the hill so I want to this time use one of these hose clamps this little leak probably saved the pump from breaking over the winter time but it's all good we've had such a crazy mild winter this year I was hoping to do some cold weather ramp um testing but didn't really have the time or the chance it's finally time to step down here to the pump and get it working I anticipate that the drive pipe here has a bunch of silt stuck in it so I'm just going to use this stick sweep hold open the waste valve here and let that silt come out for a while oh yeah nice and brown [Applause] oh alright I think we're now clean enough to go so I have to build up some back pressure in the delivery pipe and I'm just going to quick this a few times and it's gonna fill up that line you can also see the water rise up here in the pressure tank if this is your first time viewing the channel if you would subscribe and ring the notification bell I have over a thousand videos on the channel and lots of content on the way if you're also unfamiliar with the RAM pump let me kind of explain what's going on here so first we had a supply line that brought water to a bucket the bucket is acting kind of like a stand pipe but also it removes the air from the drive pipe and also catches some silt a pipe comes down and drops about seven feet to the pump the pump has two moving parts a stainless-steel waste valve which is just a swing valve with the flap hanging down and there's also a secondary valve which is hard to see up under the water here that goes into a pressure tank which then goes through a delivery pipe uphill so what happens is water comes down and slams this valve closed it then shoots a pressure wave back up the pipe and also into that secondary valve when that happens a negative happens here and the valve swings open once again so it's just a constant back and forth water hammer and you can see the kind of water it's moving here with each cycle it's a 3-inch pipe about two inches of space there is being sent up the delivery pipe way up the hill to the storage tanks so now that the pump is working like it should and it's clean enough to get by with let's head up the hill and I will show you the storage tanks I completely forgot to film the water tanks in my video and now it's a few days later a crew of guys are over here chopping down some trees so but let's talk about the storage tanks here of the RAM pump system so as I said before my delivery pipe comes up the hill and it circles around my tower post down here and it comes up into this lower portion down here if you listen you can hear the RAM pump cycling so that comes up here through a non-return valve goes here and then enters into the bottom of the tanks now this confuses a lot of people and let me explain why I have done this here so when you feel from the bottom of a tank the water will slowly rise across all of these tanks equally makes a water level if I were to take this same pipe and fill from the top you would have to have that column of water from the top all the time so that extra 3 feet would always be weighing down on the pump when you fill from the bottom it doesn't have that extra height already it just slowly makes that as it goes up it may be a confusing explanation but in other words it's faster to fill from the bottom than the top so it will equal out all across there on the back side of the tank I have got an exit pipe coming out of the middle one here it just keeps the water from overflowing at the top of the tanks comes out here spins around and let me show you that output here I've never actually tested to see how much water I've got filling these tanks but you can see it's a pretty decent bit flowing out there now the gravity-feed down to the garden comes out of this pipe right here I have a shutoff I could use but it comes down here and then gravity feeds all the way back down to the garden the Creek is way over here and we're halfway up my Hill you can see my delivery pipe coming up here it goes under my culvert and up the hill to my storage tanks we'll check that out here in a bit but I have two places where I'm going to be using the water one is right here then go ahead and close this off so now the water is going to be coming only through this right here which I just recently buried comes over here to my garden fence and this is where I intend on using the water the most here in my garden so I've got a pipe that comes up right here and I'm going to be using this here in my little garden space but what I want to do is connect my pressure gauge here when the water starts to flow a bit and then we will be able to see what the height is from this point to the top of the hill I'm assuming somewhere around 15 to 20 foot of drop that would just give us the PSI rating to see what kind of watering tools we can use here in the garden yeah I've given this thing about 15 minutes and let me see if I can zoom in here so you can see what's going on I've got a bit of a blur there okay so you can see the 20 in there and there's three lines so it's five per line and we're slightly over the middle one so I'm guessing we have somewhere around 11 maybe 12 psi in there oh there you go that's a better angle so I'll go ahead and let the air out of here and see if that alters it any okay I capped off this end that is right over here and came to this side because it has this nice handle so we're at zero right now and if I go ahead and flip this it pops up to the same point which is somewhere around the seven or 12 psi not quite to that next line there which is 15 let's say we have 11 psi down here at the water outlet 11 psi divided by 0.4 3 3 equals 25 and 1/2 feet of head pressure that's the drop that is from the tanks up here to where we're going to be using our water pretty cool so with 11 psi there's a lot of stuff I can do when it comes to watering the garden down here I actually have a couple of fun projects coming up with some sprinklers so definitely stay tuned with that being said if you've enjoyed this video hit the thumbs up and remember to subscribe and hit the notification bell I have a whole bunch of ram pump videos on the way this spring and summer thanks for watching and I will see you in the next video bye on a side note here I let it sit until the tanks were full and now we have almost 20 psi so whenever the tanks are full we should have enough pressure to do a lot of work watering our garden down here really cool I like this a lot

Channel: Land to House

Views: 98,198

Rating: 4.9408865 out of 5

Keywords: land to house, land two house, ram pump, hydraulic ram pump, how to build a ram pump, ram pump design, water pump, hydro ram pumps, hydraulic ram, diy ram pump, building a ram pump, water ram pump, how to make a ram pump, pump, homemade ram pump, hydraulic ram pump diy, ram water pump, ram pump plans, ram pump build, how to install a ram pump, rife ram, ram pump 2020, install

Id: 4OzsnOmV6NQ

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020