Starting up the Ram Pump 2019

welcome to land the house I'm Seth Johnson today I'm out here by the creek to get my ram pump up and running for the new year I just planted the garden and also I'm gonna be doing a lot of ram pump testing this year and so I want to have lots of water up on top of the hill which means I've got to get this thing running so let's head up here to the intake and just start from the top and work our way down getting the ram pump prepared to start sending water up the hill the intake consists of two three inch PVC pipes that are about two foot long with lots of holes drilled in and screen around that and as you can see over the winter a lot of silt like this right here has just built up around here so I need to pull down my little dam and just get all of this cleaned out so that I can have a fresh start with clean screens it's mid-april and the water is still quite cold but we're gonna power through it's going to pull the rocks back [Applause] we actually just had a sizable rain and a bit more water than usual just unscrew it the older side that I made and it's just got a whole bunch of silt stuck in that screen see if I can find a way to get it out of there without having to take it apart [Applause] okay the intake is now clean and should be good to go oftentimes I'm asked is important to build a big structural dam for the RAM pump and most of the time the answer is no as you can see I just have some rocks lined up here just enough to make a pool to gather water so no big dam is really required all right let's follow the supply line here down to our bucket and see what the next step of cleaning is a very common question that I get is what's the supply line what's the stand pipe and what's a drive pipe we just cleaned out the intake which feeds a supply line the supply line does not have the pressure wave jumping back and forth it just brings water down to a stand pipe so this bucket right here the water that's coming in if you were to match the height of the creek at the intake would be about right here a little above the bucket what happens is I actually lose a little head pressure as it goes into this tee and feeds back into the flume but on a typical stand pipe you'd want the water to be about six inches to a foot below the top of the pipe or in my case a bucket what this does is even if air enters into the supply line as it's coming down and feeding the bucket or standpipe the ramp pump drive pipe which is what actually drives the pump and has the pressure wave jumping back and forth doesn't have air access as you can see this pipe comes in almost a foot below the surface of the water there so this one ever sees air now I notice that my supply line does have air in it because whenever I was taking the intake up it pulled in air so what I'm going to do is as you can see it's got a little bit of a flow rate if I pick this up please back into the pipe in and drop it it will pull the air out of the pipe so for the next minute or so it's going to be gurgling as it pulls more water through and pulls the air bubbles out of here you'll be able to see some in just a second here we go there we go looks like the majority of the air is out and the flow rate is much increased so now that's what we want to feed our pump looks like there is some silt at the bottom of my bucket which is another reason to use a bucket versus a stand pipe because now I can pull this down here and clean out the silt and sediment that's building up down there at the bottom intake is clean supply line is clean bucket filter is now clean making some good progress here it's nice to have this great flow rate filling up my bucket okay it's now flowing back over now I had one concern what if the bubbles that are being created by the supply line not because the supply line has bubbles in it but because it's mixing here what if it's causing bubbles to go into the RAM pump drive pipe it's possible so I may have to find some way of diverting that flow maybe I could take like a piece of this rubber and just kick it off to the side and that would stop the bubbles from going down the water I think it's worth a try very simple solution just drape some of that rubber over here and the bubbles are no longer getting down to the drive pipe intake okay I'm going to keep the leaves and stuff out of here by putting my little lid back on Rock okay cool now let's move on down the drive pipe to the pump and see how that is faring the waterfall makes it a bit hard to hear as you can see the pump is covered and ladies and sticks it carried away real quick [Music] now depending on the amount of air that is stuck in the drive pipe this should start pretty quick I'm going to hold down the waste valve and let the air out it's making a pretty solid snap so I think it won't take too long to get this going I'm seeing some dirty water public and hold this open a little bit longer it's also having to fill the delivery pipe up the hill so there's enough back pressure to operate the pump as a quick troubleshooting tip if you feel like you got all the air out of the drive pipe and you keep pushing this valve down and it never does start a way to check to make sure things are working at the pump is to close the delivery valve [Music] and now after a couple of clicks if it works that means that the delivery pipe just needs to be filled up so as you can see it is building pressure in the tank here when it reaches a certain back pressure the pumps going to start on its own so now I know that the pump itself is operating just fine but the delivery pipe going uphill needs to be filled with water so we go ahead and open the valve it's gonna stop again I'm going to continue to push this until the pump runs on its own [Music] when the pump is operating correctly you can hear a nice solid snap at the valve but also when you take a step back you can hear a very solid snap in the drive pipe now it's time to follow the delivery pipe up to the top you'll notice on this one inch Ram pump that the output is half-inch and that is a poly pipe that swings around here and comes over here and let me show you something that happens it steps up to three-quarter inch now is that significant no I did not have enough of the half inch whenever I was installing my system a question that I am asked almost weekly is if I increase the size of the delivery pipe is it going to help the RAM pump or increase the output it does not basically atmospheric pressure is pushing down on this delivery pipe at the same rate no matter if it's a half inch or a four inch pipe so increasing the pipe size de nos does not affect that unless you have friction loss but because this pump is only putting out about a half gallon to a full gallon per minute the friction loss is very minimal now if you're gonna drive this a mile ya go as big as you can afford because it's gonna help out with friction loss over such a long distance but with the three or four hundred feet I've got here half inch or even three quarter no big deal at all one last note down here by the pump I'm using poly pipe as the delivery pipe does not matter because there's no real pressure wave going through here the water is going in one direction way up the hill but you'll notice I've used a more rigid PVC as the drive pipe here there is a very powerful pressure wave going back and forth in that pipe and so as little movement as possible is going to be good for that pipe taking your delivery pipe through a culvert is a very effective way of going over a road or in this case under a road pipe comes out here and then goes way up the hill past car to the tanks up here let's go check it out and see what's happening you'll notice there are two pipes going up the hill one of them is feeding the tanks and one of them is coming back down so that I can water the garden down here we'll see that in just a bit after we climb up the hill to the water tanks to tell where the water has reached in your delivery pipe you can tap on it especially if it's this flexible pipe here's the downspout it's hollow here's the up spout another you can tell the difference but that one's definitely heavier as you can see the way it's laying but it sounds different too the pump is way down there in the creek and I'm just tapping right here and it's hollow and I stepped right back over here and I could hear that it was not hollow so water is at least to this point traveling on up to the tanks let me show you those real quick now a lot of people are concerned about how this goes into the tanks water comes in around the delivery pipe sweeps up and goes to the bottom of the tanks as you can see here so feeds in and then if I need to have the water on down low comes out down here and heads on back down to the garden spot I also have an outlet over here that I can use if I want to drain something quickly or with a much bigger pipe so here in the middle the water comes up splits and we'll go over here for a third tank if I need it but also goes over here to the second tank and fills the two of these equally not sure if I can get you up high enough but the caps on the top are slightly unscrewed to allow air in and out the overflow comes out of this top pipe here and just spins around and goes over here into the woods one last thing to mention here if for some reason the RAM pump gets stuck open instead of letting all the water back down this one-way valve will prevent it from back feeding to the pump the water has reached this far empty pipe full pipe let's see how close we are here this is the input not yet there we go very very close as we wait for the water to reach the tanks I wanted to mention something one of the things that people have such a difficult time understanding is when the water reaches these tanks all of a sudden you've got 105 gallons here how does this Ram pump feed this giant amount of space remember what I said earlier about the delivery pipe size doesn't matter whether it's a 4 inch pipe or a half inch pipe well now we're dealing with a 2 inch pipe to 2 inch pipes so what happens is atmospheric pressure is pushing down on these equally at any given point in there so even though it's spread out a long ways across the surface it's still the same weight pushing down so example from the leg down here pumping up to about here is about the height of one of these that pressure is basically the same as filling these tanks up to the top I hope that makes sense it's very confusing for some people but just take my word for it that doesn't matter the size of the container you're trying to fill it could be a million gallon stock tank and one ram pump from the bottom could fill that eventually because any point in that stock tank is atmospheric pressure pushing down okay let's see here what the pipe is doing fool there now I had an issue of closing a valve too I closed the valve too fast and it caused the water hammer effect and it popped this joint right here so I actually need to see if I can pull that out when it's dry and get that taken care of because there's a small drip here as you can see like that and the problem is if the pump is off over the course of a couple of days that small drip will eventually drain tanks but for now it's nice to see that it's working okay so here's the plan now that we know there's water to this point right here it means that we now have access to the water at this point heading back down the hill so let's go down there and try out the water spout and see if we have water second pipe comes down the hill and reaches this point here where I have a valve buried and we should be able to get water here probably with a lot of air there you go open it all the way up here yeah a lot of air in there but as you can see it's definitely got water I have to remember to close my valves slowly and that we'll be able to feed the garden space over here and now the RAM pump is ready to go for 2019 I have some big plans I'm gonna be doing some testing up here with lots of different Ram pumps and I'm gonna use the full 105 gallon tanks to refill my testing buckets for my RAM pumps speaking of RAM pumps if you find this fascinating I sell four different models on my website land a house I have the link in the description if you don't wanna buy from there I'm also on Amazon link in the description thank you so much for watching if you would hit the thumbs up button and also share this video on your Facebook because I want to get the word out about Ram pumps and people can pump water to their gardens or livestock without having to use fuel or electricity thanks for watching I'm Seth Johnson with land the house and I will see you in the next video by the RAM pump has been going for three hours now wanted to come up here and check things it's still a pretty significant leak here and about right there so probably a total of about 25 gallons so not the best flow rate but certainly getting the job done over the course of a day these will be full and if I can get that leak stopped we'll be even better

Channel: Land to House

Views: 993,093

Rating: 4.8885698 out of 5

Keywords: land to house, land two house, ram, pump, ram pump, hydraulic, water, drive, pipe, delivery, bucket, intake, clean, start, drive pipe, stand pipe, land to house ram pump, how to start, build, how it works, buy, purchase, design, hydraulic ram pump, water pump, large ram pump, linear ram pump, 1/2 inch ram pump, wranglerstar ram pump, hydro ram pump, homemade ram pump, underwater ram pump, best ram pump design, how high can a ram pump lift water, Install

Id: VlOylKqbQ9A

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2019