This will Kill a Ram Pump EVERY TIME

welcome to land the house i'm seth this is my personal ram pump it's been out here in the creek for about three years and i ran it this year for about a month and then suddenly it stopped so let me show you what it's doing and we will troubleshoot what's going on and get it fixed up so you can see the water is coming to the pump just fine and there's no air in the drive pipe so if i've got the delivery closed off that basically lets me know there is not an issue with back pressure so it should start on its own here and watch this the air level inside of my clear pressure tank goes up when it cycles and then it goes back down so what's happening is a leak and i'm assuming it is in this inline valve here so water is going to go in here fill the tank and then there's something stuck in here letting water seep back this way so we're going to take this out of the creek and hopefully remove this valve and find out if it's got some debris stuck in there this thing has been in here for so long it is really locked down in there so i may just have to get the debris out of here and see if i can find my support board and unscrew it from there let's see what i can find here [Applause] there we go i got it out all right if i can get this union to unscrew here then we can pull this out of the creek managed to get the pump out of the water had to go back up and get some channel locks my screws that i used are uh drywall screws i may not be able to get them off of here there we go there's one about this side i think i'm gonna replace those with some deck screws three years underwater and there's not much left of those sheetrock screws that's crazy so yeah i'll be using uh just some deck screws and maybe they'll last a good three years or so all right well my assumption is something is stuck in this valve or after three years it has developed a crack or who knows let's go ahead and get into this thing and see what we can find maybe not the best place to work on it but let's see what we got here so you saw how the water was going up and then back down in the pressure tank i know it'll be hard for you to see that going on with a regular clear uh tank there but that is usually a good sign that this valve has gone bad or most commonly just has something stuck in it so let's go ahead and get this other side off and we'll see if we can find something that is stuck in there aha if i blow backwards into this thing it's letting something through so let's see if we can flush it real quick and if it'll keep doing that just got a garden hose let's see if i can do something with it here [Applause] definitely letting water through it would seem as though our valve has just gone bad i've let this thing freeze for three winters now and uh i don't know if maybe this the seal is off of it or what but it's letting some air through so let's just put a new valve on and we should be good to go all right with this valve i blow in there nothing comes out so it's a good new one so that was our problem i'm pretty much 100 sure one thing that can help to avoid this kind of problem is to totally drain and remove your pump in the winter time i just let this thing sit for three years whenever i wasn't using it i do have ram pumps for sale atlantahouse.com they won't have this stainless steel valve they'll have the brass valve which actually we found out works better because this one is so heavy it limits your situation where you can use it all right let's put this back on our support board here i think i'm gonna get some new plumber's strap because this one is quite rusted i've been asked by a few people what is the anticipated longevity of the ram pump and honestly if you treat it like i do here four years if you uh treat it better than i do which wouldn't take much you can get these things several more years i have customers from six and seven years ago still using their pumps and the key is to keep them out of the sun as much as you can and then also to bring them in in the wintertime or at least drain the water out whenever you keep the water in there it really does reduce the life because of freezing issues [Applause] okay that should get us back up and running let's take this down to the creek get it reinstalled and i'm thinking we will see water pumped back up the hill so the ram pump cycles about once per second the longest i ever had this running was six months straight so you think about it that is approximately 15 million cycles that this pump went through that first year and so after that i typically run it for about three or four months out of the year so i'm gonna just assume this thing the valve we just replaced has cycled about 45 million times so if you consider that it's done pretty good i don't know what they're rated for but that is certainly a high number of cycles okay we should be good now go ahead and close this tank valve open the drive pipe okay i've got to fill this tank real quick with water take this a few times all right that should be good enough open this back up water surges out and goes back up the hill this may stop while i cycle this a few more times here [Applause] okay and there we go cycling on its own so as it pumps water is going to build up in here a little bit probably to about right up here and uh it's just pushing water up the hill currently i think what's happening is i need to uh go close a valve at the garden there we go basically the water was going up from the ram pump in the creek way up the hill top of up here coming back down coming around and going to my little sprinkler over here and that was preventing the ram pump from cycling as it should so we are good to go now okay that's all a very short video just showing you that sometimes when parts go bad specifically the inline valve it will not let the pump build pressure in the tank because the water gets pushed in there and then right back out into the waste valve so if your pump is operating like that and the pump is newer than mine then it's worth taking that off blow in into it see if it's going to push air the opposite way of the flow if it does look for a small rock or a leaf or something in there that will prevent it from flowing i've had just a tiny piece almost a piece of sand holding that valve open so flushing out with water usually will clean it out thanks for watching and i will see you in the next video bye

Channel: Land to House

Views: 20,544

Rating: 4.925828 out of 5

Keywords: land to house, land two house, waste valve, inline valve, pump stopped working, ram pump, hydraulic ram pump, free energy, wranglerstar ram pump

Id: hSxoGImy_dA

Length: 9min 49sec (589 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021