The Ram Pump Design Manual *Calcs Pressure Elevation Measurements Sizing Operation*

okay real briefly this video will cover many of the technical details and determine whether or not you will be able to build a ramp pump given your situation or if you don't know what a ramp pump is we'll go into that we'll go into how to take elevation measurements how to take volume calculations how to figure out what the best size of RAM pump for your situation is how to correct for elevation we're going to go into a whole bunch of stuff here and then we'll go over some of the finer nuances of ramp pumps as it relates to practical application regarding plumbing fittings types of pipe filtration intake standpipe setup all that sort of stuff so this video is basically a technical manual so that you can understand how to design and implement a ram pump on your farm or homestead I spent a lot of time playing with Ram pumps and learning about them and I've done a couple different video call for many different videos on them and a couple of them really took off so there seems to be some interest so I thought I would do this video because I had a lot of questions along these lines and I thought I would just make one long video and cover it all said and done I think this video is gonna be about an hour and a half I apologize for the length but I really wanted to be clear and specific on technical details so hope you'll bear with me if you're interested in this sort of thing and you want to build a ramp pump I hope this video will help but worry fourth twenty twenty so I've been promising to get back to this video for quite some time this video is basically a site selection and how you measure and take calculations on a site to determine whether or not you can put a ramp pump on a site and if you can what size ramp pump you can put on and and generally what its output will be how high it can pump what the volume will be all those sort of parameters so what is a ram pump a ram pump is a hydraulically hydraulically operated pump basically it uses a portion of the water that is falling from a water source to drive the pressure in the pump some of that pressure some of that energy is used and transferred to build pressure in the pressure chamber the pressure chambers side is the output side that delivers a small portion of the water that is being pumped through the RAM pump to your destination the rest of the water that's going through the pump is wasted it's not actually wasted its energy is being used to pump the small portion of water up so a ram pump will typically pump about ten times the fall distance so if you have water falling ten feet and you have enough water to supply a ram pump you can basically pump to a hundred feet with a portion of that water and usually that runs somewhere around ten to fifteen percent of the total volume throughput of the pump I do have a video on calculating and RAM pumps efficiency perhaps I'll drop a link below you can check that as well so basically a ram pump is a hydraulically operated pump and it uses an air pressure chamber to buffer the hydraulic shock that we're taking advantage of hydraulic systems are systems that don't have any gas in them and so the fluid inside that system is virtually incompressible water can be compressed but it's such a small amount that it's not noticeable and so instead of letting that shock be a detriment to the system we take advantage of that hydraulic concept and we use it to pump a small portion of the water going through the pump so that's basically what a ram pump is and how it works okay so before we get too much deeper into calculating ram pump stuff anytime you engineer or design something you really want to understand the machine that you're trying to design and what what's involved in it you really need to understand the specifics of it before you can really you know determine whether it's something you can do so I'm gonna share this link here in this but below this video this is the Clemson edu link on homemade hydraulic ram pumps this is by far the best manual that I found to date and this is the one that I designed my ram pump from and this manual has a tremendous amount of excellent information in it so we should just go into some basic basic understanding of Ram pumps so I'm gonna read this to you and then we'll go from there so this information is provided as a service to those who want to try to build their own hydraulic ram pump the data from our experiences is one of these homemade hydraulic ram pumps is listed in table four near the bottom of this document the typical cost of fittings for a one and a quarter inch pump currently is 120 dollars u.s. regardless whether galvanized or PVC fittings are used now this is an older manual so the cost has gone up a bit due to material costs going up in inflation this is the basic diagram of how a ram pump works especially we should go over that quickly well we'll come back to that I think from let's say they go into connections a little bit and and using proper appropriate and proper fittings and connections let's see important pieces pressure chamber a bicycle or scooter tire inner tube is placed inside the pressure chamber part 15 as an air bladder to prevent water logging or air logging inflate the tube until it is spongy when squeezed and then insert it in the chamber it should not be inflated very tightly but have some give to it basically this is going to act as a shock absorber so the pump doesn't tear itself apart no information is available concerning pressure chamber sizes for various sizes of RAM pumps make one for a somewhat larger pumps for instance try a six-inch diameter by twenty-four pressure chamber or for a three-year tram I will say I have tried many different chamber sizes and I found that the size of the chamber once you get to big enough to absorb shock doesn't matter much and it will not affect your pump delivery or anything so don't go crazy I'm building a chamber you probably don't need more than four inch diameter and 36 to 48 inches tall unless you're building a massive ramp pump like in the four inch range or bigger or maybe even three inch you might get a little bit bigger but anything below that from two inches on down you can go down to pretty small if you're building a half inch or a three-quarter inch or one-inch Ram you probably don't need much more than I don't know maybe a foot tall by three inches in diameter I've tried all sorts of different stuff as shock absorbers I have not found anything that last long-term I have not gone back and retry the the bicycle inner tube I think that is probably your best bet but what I ended up doing was just you know occasionally I drained the the pressure chamber out and let fresh air into it and then I fill it back up and run it and I find that runs for a couple of weeks before it dies down ultimately I want to put a snifter valve in but that can be a little bit tricky because you have to drill a hole that lets just enough air in without compromising the efficiency of your pump and I've been a little hesitant to do that but since the pump works so well let's see they talked about using a they tried to use a four inch threaded plug for this pressure chamber so they can get it open and closed they found that this combination leak regardless of how tightly it was tightened or how much teflon tape they used in the seal which results in if you have a leak in the pressure chamber the pressure chamber water logs out quickly and then your RAM pump doesn't run as efficiently and it will tear itself apart because now all that shock is being put on every piece of that pipe one thing with hydraulics the pressure that you put into a hydraulic system is uniform across the system so if you have a water shock or water hammer situation in the system that shock is being distributed to the entire system at the same time so they say this in turn increased the shock waves and could possibly a shortened pump life and they say if the bicycle tube should need to be serviced when using the glue when using the glue cap the pipe may be cut in half and then you can reglue them with a coupling I don't like doing that I did find a way around the threaded plug issue I do recommend you use a threaded plug except I would get some silicon sealant I could use for aquariums and I'd put that on the threads of the plug and I'd thread the plug in and I'd let that sit 24 hours at room temperature to dry or cure and then I found that that kept it from leaking and it made it so you can open it up later on with you know a pair of channellocks or a big pipe wrench you could get that cat back off but that maintains your seal so that was how I got around that issue let's see so valve number one is Drive Inlet for the water pump just go back and look at this diagram quick here so this is a on/off valve asically and this here is a check valve and this here is a check valve this check valve is run reverse so as water flows down the pipe it pushes the check valve until it slams shut when this check valve slams shut that forces through the water shock that forces this check valve open and lets a portion of the water out and into the pressure chamber that water fills in to the pressure chamber there's airspace in here say from like here or so and that water fills into the pressure chamber because the air allows it to when the equilibrium between this pressure and this pressure is met then this valve closes and it holds that pressure in there and then you're letting that pressure out slowly over time basically out through your delivery line and this cycle will keep repeating itself this valve will fall back due to gravity once there's no pressure holding it and when it does it'll open up water will start to flow again and it'll come through it'll slam this valve shut again that will push this open again push another portion of water in and the cycle continues so that's how that works that's basic understanding let's see they get into some pretty in-depth information in here one thing we do have to cover is drive pipe so these calculations these numbers right here are excellent for calculating drive pipe length so let's just oh boy if I can find my calculator okay real briefly I want to touch on the drive pipe of the RAM pump the drive pipe of the RAM pump is the water inlet side go into the pump that usually either comes from your water source directly or it comes from your stand pipe depending on the logistics involved in your system and the terrain that you're working in but basically the drive pipe is the water flowing into the pump that drive pipe should not have any air in it so that you don't have any place for the water to compress except through the valves that are in the pump and that that water in that drive pipe is effectively acting as a sledgehammer and so just to help you visualize this concept a little more if you have a 20 foot long pipe full of water that has a certain amount of weight and mass to it and that's moving in inertia in each cycle of the pump if you have a 40 foot pipe that's the equivalent of double the amount of water in there and it's basically double the sledge hammer that's driving that initial valve in the pump and so you have more energy available in there but there are some limitations to that we'll get into that in another clip all right let's talk about shockwave and refraction wave in a ram pump so in a ram pump on water when the when the primary the impetus valve opens water starts to flow down your drive pipe and as it flows it picks up speed and as it picks up enough speed it eventually picks up enough speed that it catches that check valve and slams that check valve shut when that happens there are actually two way two waves that happen there there's a pressure wave that happens immediately when that valve closes all that moving inertia and water behind that valve is forced to come to a stop that causes a tremendous pressure spike that's what opens the secondary valve and let some portion of the water through but right after that there's something called the refraction we've that happens and that refraction wave is sort of a it's sort of the opposite of the pressure wave and that travels back up that drive pipe and that'll either go back to the water source or back to the stand pipe depending on your setup and if that refraction wave is hindered you'll end up where your valve won't pop back open so basically the ramp pump the the water and the drive pipe flows down the drive pipe faster and faster until the drive pipe until the impetus valve is forced closed at that point there's a huge pressure spike that pushes open the secondary valve and let some portion of the water through at the same time that's happening this refraction wave starts its way back up and so the valves opened yeah it it pushes the other valve open and let some water out we reach equilibrium the secondary valve comes closed because there's nothing no resistance now pushing it open no pressure holding it open and once that equilibrium has reached this refraction wave goes back up the pipe so this is part of why if you have a ramp pump with a drive pipe that is too long you'll end up where the refraction wave will end up meeting the pressure wave and they'll start to cancel each other out so that's why it's really important that you don't exceed the maximum Drive pipe length on a ramp um or you'll basically just cancel the pumps operation and you won't pump any water so I just wanted to explain that little detail to hopefully help you visualize a little better if I can find a decent image or something to help you understand that better I'll put it up here okay all right so your Drive pipe length I'll just read this to you so you have a full understanding of it the length of the drive pipe from the water source to the pump also affects the stroke period in other words how long each cycle is a longer drive pipe provides a longer stroke period there are maximum and minimum lengths for the drive pipe the drive pipe is best made from galvanized steel more rigid pipe is better but schedule 40 PVC can be used with good results the more rigid galvanized pipe wurzel and higher pumping efficiency and allow higher pumping Heights rigidity of the drive pipe seems to be more important as efficiency than the straightness of the drive pipe I've found that to be true also drive pipe length and size ratios are apparently based on empirical data information from the University of Georgia publications see the footnote provides an equation from Calvert 1950 describing the output and stability of ram pump installations in relation to the ratio of the drive pipe length to the drive pipe diameter the best range is an length to diameter ratio of between 150 and 1,000 equations to use to determine those lengths are minimum and maximum minimum l equals 150 times Inlet pipe size and maximum l equals 1000 times Inlet pipe size so let's look at that if your Inlet pipe is 1.5 inches say and we use the 150 number you have 225 inches we'll divide that by 12 to get into feet so your minimum length would be about 18.75 feet and then we'll do it again 1.5 inch times 1,000 be about 1,500 inches over 12 is about a hundred and 25 feet and that would be your maximum maximum for 1.5 inch pipe it's our 1.5 inch ram Tom as I mentioned before mine is about a hundred and seventeen from the water source to the to the pump I did not want that entire pump to be pulsing and flexing because it's made of PVC if it were galvanized I might be less concerned and that longer stroke might give me a little bit more efficiency because there's a lot more water's weight and inertia energy in that pipe moving in a given time slamming against the valve and providing pressure but it's a really tricky balance between those two so your best to stay within these parameters let's see try a pipe length example well yeah here they did the example minimum length should be yeah 187 or 15.6 feet maximum length is same one other deal for one and a quarter would be about a hundred and four feet and so that's another part of why I did this because I looked at one and a half inch and I looked at one and a quarter knowing I might need to bump back to one and a quarter because I wasn't sure that my supply volume would hold enough for a 1.5 inch so that's another part of the reason I did this see at 125 I'd be okay but at 104 feet on one and a quarter inch pump that are one on a quarter inch pipe then I would actually be too too long a run and so that's where the stand pipe comes in so I'll just read the stand pipe piece here to you next any hydraulic ram installations show a stand pipe installed on the inlet pipe the part of the purpose of this pipe is to allow the water hammer shockwave to dissipate at a given point stand pipes are only necessary if the inlet pipe will be longer than the recommended maximum length for instance if inlet pipe or bead 150 feet in length in the above example where the maximum inlet length should only be 104 or in my case with inch-and-a-half 125 the standpipe if needed is generally placed in the line the same distance from the RAM as a recommended maximum length indicated and in my case I chose to do it differently because of the terrain I'm in and and just the logistics of the site that I'm working on it was hard to find a good a good place where I could kind of conquer the terrain there's a lot of mud and swamp and rough terrain around me there so I chose what I chose I ended up doing 35 feet which i think is a little bit longer than then the minimum length recommended for a 1.5 inch but not much if I had gone longer I probably could have gotten a little bit better efficiency but I may go back and change that at some point in the future and put steel pipe in but steel pipe is extremely expensive so for now we're running PVC now let's see the stand pipe must be vertical and extend vertically at least one foot higher than the elevation of the water source and me I would say at least two feet higher or even a little more it's amazing how much those levels can fluctuate under changing water load conditions so to speak now water should exit the pipe varying operation or even perhaps a few drops can cascade out over at the cycle at most most recommendations suggest that the stand pipe should be three sizes larger than the inlet pipe the supply pipe between the stand pipe and the water source should be one size larger than the inlet pipe this is very very important so if you're running an inch-and-a-half Ram pump you want a two inch supply line coming in to your stand plate if you use an inch and a half supply line your ramp up is always going to be short of water you have to remember we're working with the gravity here and the amount of volume you can deliver to that pump matters tremendously because that pump takes on even a little bit of air it will disrupt the pumps operation decrease its efficiency and possibly even make it shut off on you so you want to make sure your supply line is always one size larger then the drive pipe on the pump so that's an important thing to note so if you're making an inch-and-a-half Ram pump you want two inch supply line to your stand pipe if you have to put a stand pipe in if you're making a 3-inch Ram pump you want a four inch supply line if you're making a half-inch Ram pump you want a three-quarter inch supply line at least I'd say probably just go to one inch just do it it's not that much more expensive now but that's an important thing you want to make sure you have plenty of water volume coming into the stand pipe so the stand pipe stays full of water the stand pipe not only dissipates the shock wave but it also acts as a water buffer place it it makes sure that you don't deplete the amount of water that you need to keep the more pump running smoothly all right let's see and I'll read the rest of this piece to you the reason behind this is simple it's Inlet pipe is too long the water hammer shock wave will travel farther slowing down the pump pulses to the RAM also in many instances there may actually be interference in the operation of the pump due to the length of the travel of the shock wave the standpipe simply allows an outlet to the atmosphere to allow the shock wave to go somewhere again this is not necessary unless the pipe will have to be longer than recommend mat recommended maximum length so the interference things are talking about if the pipe is too long as the RAM pump starts to cycle its next cycle there's still a shock wave coming back through and it will actually interfere with the cycle and basically the RAM pump will cancel itself so you want to avoid that at all cost because obviously you're not going to move much water if the ram pump is cancelling its own action another option you could yeah you can use any kind of tank you could use a big water barrel anything you want as a as a stand pipe it doesn't have to be a pipe it could be a barrel it could be a tank you just have to make sure that it gets enough water coming in and that it's tall enough that you don't have water overflow and end up losing a lot of your water out of it you want to be higher than the level of the water that the supply is coming from and we'll get into how to the water level the line level here later in this video okay so I've started some leveling work and engineering work to prep for the ram pump installation to get an idea of what the actual mat numbers are gonna be it is 53 feet to this big maple the end is a long log and so we're talking about just about 60 feet to our mark tree and we've got an elevation drop there of 70 inches so we're just under six foot to there so looking at that I really want to have a minimum six foot so I'm gonna go ahead and string another line off this way a little further and see if I can't pick up a few more inches by going that way and then I'll figure out whether or not that makes sense pipe wise and all but right now we got this line is perfectly level from the water level on the pipe it's tied right at the water level on the pipe and it runs across level I used a line level sorry for this way I'm kind of balance here on the log too sorry for the line up put put that excuse me so I used a line level to level the line so you can see or so I can figure out what the elevation drop is and like I said it's 70 inches and we're gonna run some more line out and get a better idea of how much more drop we can get I also did a recalc on flow and looks like we're flowing about 15 gallons a minute today you Oh kiddo sectional lineup carry the level straight out from the pipe to the tree today we into before now the new line runs out over here downstream further it tags out over there it's well I would say it's about eight foot off the stream bed over here at the end of the line but I'm looking at this spot here which is about another 50 foot beyond that tree so it'd be a hundred from the pond and where that tape is right now from the level point on the line to the center of the stream bed not Bank the actual for the stream bed is 83 inches so we're just under seven foot so we get our six foot that way and that's really awesome that means we can produce plenty of pressure to get us up the hill and to the tank or tanks so yeah it looks like this is gonna be the spot we'll have to clear this all along the stream edges on either side to make working here easy and then we'll have to run a line out and deliver the water minimum drive pipe lengths for this pump design I think is 25 feet it might be 35 so we'll probably come to that tree and then start our drive pipe from the tree over so we'll just come to that tree at level and then do our drop from there on in and I should do this with ram pump that's it for now yeah higher must be higher than the elevation of the source an attached Inlet pipe to the tank the tank will act as a dissipation chamber for the water hammer a shock wave just as a standpipe would this option may not be viable if tank placement require some sort of Tower but if the topography allows this may be a more attractive option yeah and that's another thing to consider depending on where you're setting up your stand pipe may have to be pretty tall in order to compensate for the terrain you're working with and I would not recommend putting a big barrel on top of a tower unless you have serious construction skills because water is pretty heavy at eight point three three pounds to the gallon you get a 60 gallon drum full of that you're talking close to 500 pounds you don't want to end up with that coming down in your head so be sure that that's not going to happen to you I guess is what I would say so this is my ram pump setup don't mind the pieces parts spring is coming I got some pieces parts cleanup to do but so there's a spring over there in the reeds which you can't see through the reeds at the moment but rest assured there is a spring there and that's the spring that feeds this pond it puts out nice clean water we've had it tested done it barred at their lab and regardless of the cleanliness of the water you can still pump it right so this pipe coming across from the spring is a 2 inch pipe it runs Steve dam and then down to the stand pipe the total distance of this pipe this 2 inch supply line to this stand pipe is 117 feet and so I'll pull up calculations here or maybe I'll throw them up here on the screen as an overlay if you look at the charts and do the calculations for a 1.5 inch ram pump which is what I was which I which is what I calculated there was enough water volume to support you don't want to exceed well let's see for a one and a half inch ram pump with a two inch supply line you to exceed a hundred feet to the RAM pump or 105 feet something like that or you'll end up with too much back shock going all the way up this line and so you have to put a stand pipe in to relieve that shock so this pipe runs at 117 feet and hits the stand pipe and then there's another 35 feet that it goes from the stand pipe to the RAM pump we'll get into those calculations too when we get back inside and I can pull some nice numbers and charts and information up for you so the first thing I did was come out here and measure water volume coming out that was before any of this piping was here so I had to use a fairly archaic method of measuring so I measured the water volume at the time it was spring time it was getting about 10 to 15 gallons a minute I worked with Springs before so I knew this spring could be developed out a little bit more but I figured 10 gallons a minute would supply an inch and a half ram pump right on the edge and I knew I could scale the size of the pump down and I wanted to move as much as water as I possibly could so I started with inch and a half knowing I could fall back to a one inch round pump if I needed to so in order to get water volume calculations one of the easiest ways to do that if you don't have a place well first of all let me say the easy easy way to do that is to take a five gallon bucket and hold it under your outlet and figure out how many seconds it takes to fill it and then calculate you know how many gallons a minute you're getting from that obviously that's the easy way most cases if you're developing a ram pump you don't have a nice easy pipe already there to capture the water from you may not have a pipe handy that you can divert the water all the water in the stream from or from the pond or your source into a bucket and if you don't have that the next easy way to do that is to pick a spot in a stream like this where you have a given depth and width and then calculate the speed at which the water is traveling and calculate using depth width depth and width what the volume is and then use the speed to calculate how fast that volume moves through so we'll go over that in a minute but basically in this case you can see it's I should have brought a measuring tape but it's about an inch deep and it's maybe about a 10 inches wide or so where the water is actually flowing and the real simple way to do this is to take a measuring tape mark a length drop something that floats on it see how long it takes to travel that length then you have how much volume is moving at what speed we'll get into those calculations a little bit deeper later in this video but I just want to illustrate the concept for you but then the other thing you need to know for RAM pump is what your total fall is now there's a couple ways to calculate that as well but we'll go over the two easy ways one you can take something like a garden hose get it into your water source up above start a siphon on it you're gonna have to start a siphon we could go over that or you can ask a question in the comment below you start a siphon on it you bring it down and then wherever you bring that that hose end up this is called a water level you'll be you'll reach a point where you hit equilibrium where water stops slugging out the end of the hose where you drop the hose back down a little bit it starts to flow and you come up a little bit it stops that's your level point and then you can use a measuring tape to drop and take your tape drop and figure out what your fall is in this case we have about six and a half feet of fall from the top of the pond to where the ramp pump is I used a combination of a water level line like I was talking about and the other thing I used was a string level on a string and I set a stake at the water line right at the water's edge and ran a string from that water's edge out level and I ended up having to come to a post here and run another string or extend that string level again out to where I wanted to set the pump and then when I got out over the pump with a level string running level from the water level you can just drop a measuring tape down you figure out exactly what your drop is so those are some key pieces that you're going to need to have to design and determine whether your site will support a ram pump and installing a ram pump once you have those you got some calculations to do and I think I've covered everything out in the field here that I want to cover we'll get into calculations later in this video but I just want to make sure that in daylight you could see what this site is so you can better understand how to go about making these calculations so what we'll do now is we'll we'll go back inside and we'll make some calculations based on that and we'll talk about all the little eccentricities and logistics and details that go with designing a ram pump and making it function like you want it to all right so that's it for now we'll go inside and we'll talk Turkey okay so one of the core concepts you should understand right off the bat for building a ramp pump is vertical foot and how it release the pressure and head so head is the distance a vertical drop and it can be expressed in positive or negative values based on what you're doing but in general for every one foot a vertical rise you get point four three three pounds per square inch of pressure at the bottom of that water column so as you go up one foot two foot now you're at point eight six three foot you're at one point two nine nine and at four foot you're at one point seven three two pounds per square inch at the bottom of that water column this will be an important part of building your RAM pump because you're going to need two basic calculations number one the vertical foot of head that you need or that you have from your water source to your RAM pump or where your rim pump will be placed and the other one you need is the vertical foot of head that you want to pump to because if that ratio isn't high enough you won't be able to deliver a specified amount of water to the location that you want to and and the height that you're pumping to will affect how much volume of water you will actually deliver so using the line level and the water level techniques you can calculate most likely hopefully in your situation from your water source to to your RAM pump okay and so to calculate the elevation from your ramp pump to your delivery point you can use several different methods I would not count on Google Earth if you have a GPS unit you could probably get reasonable accuracy but know that that could be off as much as thirty feet on vertical elevation also even with good satellite coverage so the best way to do it is to run the line level and drop measurements and you can do series of string this level and just keep adding the drop measurement across the strings and another way to do this is you can use an orange marker and a scope with a level and you get the level set and you shoot the far point this is kind of like surveying or using a transit if you have access to a transit I highly recommend that that is really a better way to do it or if you have access to an engineer who can do elevation datum that's a possibility as well although typically that equipment is quite expensive to have someone come out and actually take elevations for so I hope this helps you understand the basics of water pressure as it relates to elevation change or vertical foot of head one other means of calculating the vertical height going either to your ramp pump or from your ramp pump to your delivery point be running any sort of pipe or hose down from the highest point and filling that pipe or hose with water and put in a pressure gage at the bottom and you can measure the pressure and calculate very accurately what the vertical distance of fall is so that line would have to be sealed completely and you have to fill it with water from some source by whatever means necessary but that would be an accurate way to get exact vertical elevation over long distances and multiple swales or where there's trees in the way obstructing your view that would be another way to do it however if you're going to do that you might consider doing it in the delivery line size that you want to select for your REM pump and then after you use that for your pressure calculations and your elevation calculations if you decide you can and want to go ahead and build a ramp pump you'll already have the delivery line for the system these are just some other thoughts and how you can arrive at accurate elevation datum for designing and building your mo okay let's briefly go back to you measuring the trench method for volume the calculation real quick we'll look at this box basically that's what we're simulating in the previously mentioned trench method you want a depth you want to width you want to make it relatively uniform and you can even take a few boards and set in the screen better to channel the water through so you get a nice uniform height the more accurate you can represent that and the more accurately you can measure the speed the more accurate your actual water volume we'll be but for example let's look at this box and consider it to be as though it were the streambed or a box set into the stream bed with water flowing through it so three and a half inches by two and a half inches by nine inches let's calculate that volume so three and a half inches by two and a half inches by nine inches seventy eight point seventy five cubic inches there's 231 cubic inches in a gallon we'll call a seventy nine for easy calculations and I did that backward so it's will say 79 over 231 cubic inches in the gallon so that box is point three four one nine nine gallons roughly so about 0.35 gallons for every time that the water cycles through that box so let's just consider that a second so if the box is full of water I'll demonstrate [Applause] and said water is flowing at a given speed now we can calculate how many times per minute effectively this box is replaced in water volume so in our calculation we're looking at a water depth of two and a half inches a channel width of three and a half inches and we're taking a 9-inch segment of that and measuring the speed with water travels through it so if it takes 60 seconds for that water to travel that length then you're looking at point three five gallons a minute and then of course you can calculate from there and figure out speed say it takes 10 seconds to to traverse that when you're doing six times point three five because there's six ten seconds segments in a minute and let's see six times three 18 so you're looking around 20 gallons a minute so this is just an example of how to do this burn number two picture this bowl like this shot here so just remember every time this fills up 0.35 gallons and then you can make your calculations easy based on the trench the water depth and the speed in which is traveling okay so let's just hash this out quick if it is will say 0.35 gallons and if it takes one second for that to four to traverse your float down that channel and that's point three five downs that means in a minute you've moved 21 gallons so then from there you can basically say quite easily how much actual volume you're moving all you got to do is take a measurement in seconds and crunch those numbers like that all formula of quick and then then you have your volume flow and of course depending on your water source you should adjust this for the time of year if you have dry seasons your water flow will likely reduce so attractive design of of RAM pump system that will work at the minimum water flow for the season so you have guaranteed water delivery throughout the season I have another video on RAM pumped scalability you can actually take a larger rain pump design and scale it down with a smaller impetus valve so that is also an option and I discovered that after building the one-and-a-half inch during dry seasons and I was able to scale down to even as small as a one inch valve delivers a lot less water but sometimes some water is better than none oh well now we're gonna get into the meat of it first we'll start with just going through the operation description as they describe it they do a very good job of describing it so let's start with that operation the pump requires some back pressure to begin working a back pressure of 10 psi or more should be sufficient if this is not provided by elevation induced back pressure from pumping the water uphill to the delivery point water trough barrel etcetera use the 3/4 valve part seven to throttle the flow somewhat to provide this back pressure so basically you're closing the output valve to create back pressure so the pump will run it won't run under zero back pressure you need to have some resistance otherwise there's not enough pressure to keep it functional as an alternative to throttling valve part seven you may consider in the running the outlet pipe into the air in a loop and then back down to the trough to provide necessary back pressure a total of 23 feet over 23 feet of vertical elevation above the pump outlet should be sufficient notice how that corresponds if you divide 23 over a point 4 3 3 pounds per square inch gives you that 10 psi they're talking about so we covered that before just wanted to reference it so you understand where that 23 feets coming from this may not be practical in all cases but adding 8 feet of pipe after piping up the hill of 15 feet in elevation should not be a major problem this will allow you to open valve number seven completely preventing the stoppage of flow by trash or sediment blocking the partially closed valve is a good idea and to include a tee at the outlet of the pump with a ball valve to allow periodic flushing of the sediment just in case and you'll notice if you go back and look at the video on my pump you'll see I have a tee in there and you can flush right out directly and I highly recommend that that's super effective for flushing and also if you end up wanting to pump water somewhere else you can just plug a garden hose in or or whatever your fitting is and move water elsewhere you can use it for washing stuff up when you're working on the pump or whatever very handy to have the secondary outlet anyway initially the pump will have to be manually started several times to remove all the air start the pump by open new valve one and leaving valves set and closed we'll just go back to this diagram quick so you know what I'm talking about here the valve one this is the output valve I'm sorry that's valve inlet valve and valve seven is the outlet valve so valve one valve seven pressure chamber pressure gage delivery line drive pipe coming in on this side seven let's see the pump will start with valve seven closed completely pumping up to some maximum pressure start the pump by opening the valve one and leaving valve seven closed then when the swing check number four shuts manually push it open again you'll have to do this several times till it builds up enough pressure to operate on its own the pump will start with valve seven closed completely pumping up to some maximum pressure before stopping operation after the pump begins operations slowly open valve seven but do not allow the discharge pressure read the pressure on the gauge to drop below 10 psi if you don't have a gauge just very gently crack that valve open I use the ball gate valves because there are a nice simple valve but you might be better off as far as that goes for regulation using the the older screw type valve where it's multiple turns so you might consider that in your design I may have to push valve number four open repeatedly to restart the pump the first few minutes ten to twenty times is not abnormal depending on your situation I would say you could go up to 50 times if you've seen my recent videos the the pump starts up I think it's like five or six but this pump my pump is really tuned in now I've really gotten it dialed in anyway Erin the system will stop operation until it is purged there specifically talking about air in the drive pipe as we were talking about you have to eliminate all air on the drive pipe so before you even start this process you want to make sure that your standpipe or your water source and your drive pipe are completely full and all the bubbles have bubbled back out through the top so it may take you know twenty or thirty seconds for all those bubbles to work their way out before you start up the unions gate or ball valves and pressure gauge assembly are not absolutely required to make the pump run but they sure do help and we're stalling removing and starting the pump as well as regulating the flow and I'll add to that another thing that the the pressure gauge is very useful for is if you end up with a leak in your delivery line later on especially if you're pumping to pretty high elevations like mine for example pump 72 vertical feet and about 900 feet distant you can use that pressure gauge to figure out where your leak is roughly in the line by looking at the pressure gauge and doing the elevation calculation and you know the approximate area to look on the line I've got a video on that too maybe I'll throw a link down below if I could remember when I'm done crunching all this all right pump performance some information to suggest that difficult ramp pumps discharge approximately seven gallons of water through the waste valve every gallon pressurized and pumped the percentage of the drive water delivered actually varies based on the ran construction vertical fall to the pump and elevation to the water outlet the percentage of the drive water delivered delivered varies from approximately 22 percent when the vertical fault of the pump is half or 50% of the elevation to the water outlet down to two percent when the vertical fault is point oh four or four percent of the elevation to the water outlet rife hydraulic engine manufacturing company offers the following equation and I would say this equation is very effective it's 0.6 times Q times F over e equals D and we'll go ahead and break that out q is the available drive flow in gallons per minute f is the fall on feet from the water source to the RAM e is elevation from the RAM to the water outlet and D is a flow by the flow rate of the delivery water in gallons per minute 0.6 is an efficiency factor and will differ somewhat between various ramp pumps for instance if 12 gallons per minute is available to operate a REM pump then the Pampas placed six feet below the water source the water will be pumped up in elevation at 20 feet the amount of water that may be pumped with approximately with an appropriately sized ramp up is 0.6 times 12 gallons a minute times 6 foot over 20 foot equals two point one six so point six is the efficiency twelve gallons a minute is delivery into the drive pipe six foot is the fall from the water source to the RAM and 20 foot is the vertical head from the ramp pump to the delivery point please pay special attention to this this is not the distance from the water source to the delivery this is a distance from the ramp up to the delivery in vertical head and so that equates out at two point one six gallons a minute the same pump with the same drive flow will provide less flow of the water is to be pumped to a higher elevation for instance using the data in the previous example but increasing elevation lift to forty feet point six times twelve gallons a minute times six foot a fall over 40 foot of a delivery point works out to about 1.0 eight gallons a minute so you notice if you double the delivery height you about half the water volume it's almost exactly half according to the formula obviously in real time it may fluctuate a little bit anyway that brings us down to this table here table two this is gold this is gold this gives you the general parameters and this is one of the charts that was super useful for me on you know what size ram pump am I going to design based on the water flow I have and what can I expect to deliver up top now I mentioned previously that I used Google Earth and GPS and actual measurements in the field I initially took GPS data from my delivery elevation from Google Earth I knew it wasn't super accurate but I didn't think it would be quite as far off as it turned out to be according to Google Earth elevation from my ram pump to the delivery point would be about 40 two feet and in real time after I started Pompey and I found out it's 72 feet so I was expecting about a gallon a half a minute I think yeah yeah so I was expecting somewhere around a gallon in half a minute based on this chart here if you look at the drive pipe an inch and a half three quarter inch output for delivery pipe and I expected a pump inflow of around 12 to 15 gallons a minute and I figured around about a gallon and a half a minute delivery but that was based on a 42-foot elevation and since it turned out to be a 72 foot elevation I get about 0.85 gallons a minute when efficiency is really right on the money and flow input is good still at point eight five gallons a minute and if you can run every day for 1440 minutes a day I'm still taking home twelve hundred and twenty four gallons a day which is absolutely way more than I need for my homestead farm here so that is a good chart to go by let's just look at Table three they're talking about an inch and a quarter schedule 40 PVC pipe oh I should mention that as well don't use cheap PVC for your drive pipe or for your pump parts use at least schedule 40 even better if you can afford schedule 80 although that is significantly more expensive use at least schedule 40 PVC if you're going to use PVC for this again we want super rigid pipe we want we want type that doesn't flex because the more the pipe flexes under that pressure the less of that energy is transferred through the secondary valve and used to pump order you know if losing that energy in Flex at a pipe let's see there out lighting at 3/4 inch schedule 40 PVC I will say this if you're trying to save some money and you want a line that you can run all over the place and and not have to do a bunch of PVC glued fittings and all that sort of stuff I would use the the black coil pipe or poly pipe it's called well pipe it's well you'll see it in my videos there it's the black stuff and it's super flexible you can get fittings for it cheap you can cut it and and put new fittings in it real easy and you don't have to use PVC glue I would recommend you get the the barbed type fittings and use appropriate stainless steel clamps for it if you're working under any serious pressure they're talking about different pressure chamber sizes see they're saying 36 inches here for the inch and a quarter pump I would say that's a good size to go with anything inch in a quarter inch and a half I would say that probably even would work for the two-inch pump you might want to go to a 48 inch length chamber for that and they're using four inch here and I've four inch I might as well let's see they're doing Inlet pipe length 100 feet outlet 40 Drive water elevation 4 foot so they're driving with 4 foot there and this is some real-world tests that they did we'll go over this I did discuss this briefly earlier in the video about the threaded plug but this will give you a good understanding of what happens when if your bladder bursts in your pump or if like me you're not running a bladder and you're just using the air pressure in the chamber over time that air will dissolve into the water and you'll lose that that air ballast in there so it's good to shut the pump supply water off occasionally and open that secondary key valve this is another reason that's really handy and drain that out and let air flow back up into that pressure chamber and then when you close that back up you have trapped air again if you don't have air in there this pump will tear itself apart because all that water shock is not being cushioned by anything that water shock ends up transmitting throughout the entire system will tear fittings apart you'd be amazed how much actual energy is there so let's just look at this quick we'll read the note first not that we used a foreign threaded plug and a foreign female adapter for our test pump instead of the recommended four inch glue cap shown in the figure two days after installation the pump air chamber was effectively waterlogged due to leakage past the threads of these two fittings which was shown by the pronounced impulse pumping at the outlet discharge point if the pump are allowed to remain waterlogged it would shortly cease to operate and may introduce damage to the pipe and other components do protect due to pronounced water hammer pressure surges the large range of expected values for shutoff head is due to the unknown efficiency of the pump typical efficiencies for RAM pumps range from 3 to 10 feet of lift for every 1 foot of elevation drop from the water inlet to the pump and so I said generally 1 to 10 but you can see here that depending on what your water delivery needs are and your situation you can actually move water a lot further than you might expect anyway if you look at this an installation there shutoff head with 5 to 17 psi 22 psi here after installation the water log it was 50 after clearing it went back to 22 operating head at 10 psi 10 psi 10 psi flow rate 0.5 to 1 gallons a minute that 0.28 gallons a minute and installation after installation when it was waterlogged they were getting 1.5 gallons a minute but surging and then after they cleared the water log it went back to 0.33 gallons a minute so that's one thing you'll notice if your bladder starts to go or if your air space in your pressure chamber starts to fail you'll see on the delivery side you'll see each pump pulse cycle come out in the form of the surge of water and we'll start surging so if you see your water delivery surging on and off in pulses instead of a fairly steady flow that's an indicator you've got a pressure chamber problem and you should probably get down there and shut it off as quickly as possible to avoid damaging your pump let's see they got a couple of snapshots here we'll just let you have a look at these quick this is a good diagram general diagram of how it works and you can see we're taking this little bit of fall here through the RAM pump and we're pumping to this very high height to the water tank they illustrate head here as well oh yeah and they're showing one without a stand pipe here and then here you're seeing one with the stand pipe or water tank for calling it but it's basically a stand pipe one point I want to make about that I said you wanted to make sure that your stand pipe was up above your water source level I mean the top of your stand pipe the bottom of your stand pipe should definitely be well below your water level what you're looking to do is set the the stand pipe about midway in and out of the level of your water source so that you have a constant volume supply I hope I've made that clear this installation is one option usually the inlet pipe is longer than the maximum length allowed the open water tank is required to allow dissipation of the water hammer shock wave I think we discussed that previous but I just want to make sure you get all the details here here's another sample installation this is another option used with the inlet pipe is longer than the maximum length allowed remember we did our calculations early on for different pump sizes the standpipe open to atmosphere at the top is required to allow dissipation of the water hammer you can see they're using an actual pipe in this example and in this example they're using a tank it really doesn't matter what you're using for hardware what matters is your water levels and your volume supplies are good and I want to remind you once again that whatever size drive line you're using for your RAM pump you need to be ones pipe size bigger than that for your supply line remember we're working with gravity feed here so if your RAM pump drive pipe is one-inch you want inch and a hot inch and a half pipe feeding your stand pipe if you're an inch and a half ram pump drive pipe then you want two inch feeding your stand pipe at least you can go bigger than that if you want and so on and so forth see I think I think that's about everything they're just kind of illustrating some different pieces here anyway again Allah I'll show the link to this down at the bottom and you can go check it out yourself that formula for calculation I will put up as well this is very important for figuring out whether you'll get enough water of your situation or whether it's worth building the RAM pump but you do need to take those measurements and calculations as I previously discussed and like I said the more accurate you can do that the better off you're going to be in determining where your actual real time volume production can or will be so here we are back out in the field at the spring head few more details to go over here in the field from a practical perspective just wanted to finish up on these details so one you want an intake suction strainer for your source water so you don't get debris in your pump debris can damage your pump it can also get into that secondary spring check valve and it will actually lock the valve open if you get like a stick wedge in there I've had that happen and your pump stops working and you don't know what's going on till you take it all back apart so before you run any water through your piping make sure you have a good filter on this filter actually is clearly due for a replacement again I put this in just a couple of years ago this was an old like air scrubber type filter and I just took all the carbon filtration stuff out of it and use the caging that worked pretty well you want a relatively large size filter so you don't have one little spot suck in all kinds of gunk on the filter and clogging it quickly so I would say look for something that's a large size and screen mesh at least as small as that as your final mesh you don't want to let anything bigger than that in I would say that's probably eighth inch that's probably a decent size for an inch and a half Ram if your RAM pump is smaller you have to make your screen smaller but you'll also be pulling less water volume so that's just all to be kept in mind there's various different methods for making intake filters if you request a video on that I may do something like that for now let's move on down to fittings pump site just want to point out a couple of things I for my setup to pull I wanted to pull fresh spring water to the RAM pump and not just pond water so you can see I've isolated the spring up there and I'm pulling the spring water straight through the pond without touching the pond water it gives a nice clean spring water feed and we've actually hadn't tested and it's drinkable so that's very nice and it's excellent spring water anyway all that aside two things here you have the valve here which I broke the the handle part of the valve so I just use a channel locks to turn this valve but this valve makes it so we can shut water off to the stand pipe and work on this system everything below the pond dam here one of the reasons I want to mention one of the reasons that I put a stand pipe in here is not only because of pipe length but also because of the shock wave that's generated if you dissipate that at the stand pipe then you don't have as much shock wave coming back up your supply pipe and any time you're running through a dam you don't want to be put in shock on it because you'll create a leak around the pipe and then it will Road the dam and then you won't have a dam so just an important point to note if you're gonna be piping through a dam make sure you put a stand pipe in to dissipate that shock before you go back through the dam with your piping network us alright another thing we use here these are super super useful they're expensive and I recommend you get to schedule 80 these are really nice these are called unions and they basically just thread together you can you can get threaded and you can get a slip fit I recommend you get the threaded fit and get the end threaded end coupling for the pipe and glue that on and then if you have a problem later on you have to replace pipe you can unthread these expensive fittings from your broken pipe if it breaks right up to it on you and you can save the fitting otherwise if you use the glue fittings if the pipe cracks up to the fitting you'll lose that and those are about 20 or 25 bucks a pop the putting the size you're working in at least an inch and a half to inch in that range so that's something to consider let's go down and look at some other pieces parts so the dam is right about here we've just come down our supply line which is two inch pipe coming into our stand pipe this is a great place for me to show you immunity though sorry I had to do this now you want to finish this video off so basically there's just two plastic and the other side of that without going deep in the mud yeah the other side of this is supposed to have a rubber gasket I got to pick up another one but under low pressure like this it's not a big issue anyway these two pieces fit together and then you can see this is threaded and this collar is threaded on the inside and it just threads together and then that way you have an easy way to take your part applies for working on it or I don't know if you saw in the beginning like first started flushing here all the mud came out plus all the might help let the pump shut off - kemaman so we'll pretend it's to punch our way up through this alright we'll just work our way through the rest of the standpipe here quick so we've got a low input coming in you'll notice I use four inch PVC pipe tea for the two inch output on the tea so I can pipe my two inch into four inch stand pipe the bottom is a ninety degree four inch and it's got a four inch threaded end cap on it so basically the stand pipe also acts as a sediment and small rock trap in case something does get through the screen it falls out in here or floats out to the top instead of going into the pump so when you stop the pump and dump the flush open you can flush it out the other thing that's really handy to have is another output on your stand pipe pardon my footing and I have a two inch here this is a nice way to be able to just shut water off for the pump without having to shut that master valve off and also another way to flush through the pipe you just want to open it up the flush let's see other factors we are about three feet below actual water lines so water comes up to about here you can see that in scale anyway I would say you're coming out of your stand pipe you're gonna want to set your drive pipe output to your ram pump lower than you think it is so I would say go significantly below water level but keep in mind that you do want to keep a relatively steady slope going out to the pump itself so those are factors to consider try to stay lower because when your water supply goes low and this pipe won't fill up as much and and you want to make sure that you're still below where you pick up air bubbles at least until you run out of water supply to run the pump so the standpipe is filling now with water the ramp up is off and the valve is open at the moment so what we'll do we'll go through the startup sequence here quick go quickly I'll point out this whole bottom part of the stand pipe is glued together the top I did not glue on for a couple reasons one so you can take it off to work on it and two if you add a float gauge later like I did with a couple of bottles and reflective posts now you have a way to know where your water levels at at a glance on your stand pipe it also makes it so if something gets stuck in there you can get at it to get it out lots of handy things about that I'll just step back quick let you see the gauge is low at the moment because the pump is open it's just draining off water will shut it off and you'll watch that gauge climb up in a sec okay here we are and I just want to point out that I used a little loose I used a foot valve instead of the swing check valve I highly recommend the foot valve because it's a guided valve and you can add weights if you want to change the stroke cycle of the pump you can tweak your pump efficiency water volume delivery and you can scale it back if you need to for low water supply to some degree other thing that I do I take two two PVC fittings two inch on the inch and a half brass pump that I have I slap them over and that way we don't end up with somebody wearing some perfume Wow anyway that way we don't end up with the water spitting off both sides on us so I shut that off and you could hear the bubbles gurgling up I'm sure and now you can see if i zoom in on the standpipe that that reflector is sitting up out of there now indicating the reservoir is filling up so we'll see if this will start up it's been open for a while so it hasn't had a chance to accumulate a lot of water in the spring but we've had good water this year so hopefully it'll go so let's see I want to close both the valve first startup and that pressure you're hearing is pressure sitting on the valve from when the pump was running before probably so let's just dumped off all the pressure see this pump start off easy it's well tuned there you go you can see all that pressure coming off from that that's because the delivery line is frozen right now if one of the points it crosses into the soil that's it so I would use brass valves for your spring check valve and or stainless even better if you can afford it I would put a union here right on your input to your pump as well and I would put a shutoff valve right in front of that probably I haven't done that yet but as you saw I can I can bypass let's see the rest of this should be steel these other fittings in between should be steel and I would do PVC you know different union sizes to make your fit up to get to your pipe size I don't have a four inch here I have three inches actually and it's maybe 36 42 inches tall somewhere in there for the inch and a half pump and that's plenty of space while I could do half that and be okay okay I think that's the majority of it I did mention having the extra tea valve that's this right here so you slip off and you jump off and I also have a shutoff on the output so I can shut off the output and testing or divert water one last important detail mounting you should really follow their advisement in the manual and like pour a concrete base and set bolts on that and be able to strap your pipe to it with bolts and nuts if you can't do that you can do something like I did here I get a big piece of railroad tie and I kind of set the pump up on that and then I drill the holes through that and I drove 5-inch rebar in not 5-inch rebar oh I'm sorry five-foot rebar in half-inch rebar down through those holes to anchor this and even given that I could probably improve my efficiency a little more if I set some concrete in here and really sure this up solid you want to anchor your pump really well there's a lot of force there think about a 40-foot long pipe inch and a half in diameter moving water slam in the one spot okay that's it okay I think I'm finally done with this video we've covered a lot of stuff here thank you for bearing with me if you've made it all the way to the end of this video it's gonna end up somewhere around an hour and a half all said and done a look of it appreciate you watching it if you have any questions or comments please do so down below don't forget to Like and subscribe please share this video with friends if you know other people that might be interested even just in checking it out your views really helped my channel and it helps me keep making videos like this so thanks to my viewers and subscribers thanks for watching and it helped look at you in future videos

Channel: The Farmacy Seeds Network

Views: 70,120

Rating: 4.832139 out of 5

Keywords: TFSN, garden, farm, farming, Farm of Things, FOT, automation, water pumping, water, alternative energy, spring water, ram pump, ram, hydraulic ram pump, diagnostics, troubleshooting, techniques, design, ram pump startup, manual, clemson, university, tips, problem, what's wrong, calculations, volume, supply, elevation, pressure, measure, line level, water level, prepper, prepping

Id: rxqUkybsxYw

Length: 79min 9sec (4749 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 09 2020