We Found Water For The Pond - Hydraulic Ram Pump

hey everybody adam here with hometown acres welcome back if you caught our last pond update video you know that we have a water supply shortage issue going into the pond and i mentioned in that video that one possible solution would be to drill a well to feed the pond to keep it full which seems like a pretty drastic measure considering it's going to be about eight to ten thousand dollars to do that pretty expensive option in my opinion and i've been doing some research on the internet about some alternative solutions and one solution that i found that looks pretty promising is this contraption sitting here right behind me and the good news is it only costs about four to five hundred dollars not eight to ten grand so we're gonna go ahead and try it out today i'll explain how it works and then we'll go stick it in the water see if it works and hopefully it's gonna save us the price of a well all right so this contraption here is called a hydraulic ram pump and basically what it is is a device that allows you to pump water uphill with no external power source basically you have head pressure on this side of the pump that generates pressure in this pressure tank and that is gonna that is what allows you to pump water uphill and the general rule of thumb on these is for every one foot of head pressure that you have here you can build up enough pressure in the pressure tank to give you seven foot of rise on the other side virtually allowing you to pump water uphill with no external source so there's really only two moving parts in here that are is used to power the water so you've got two uh check valves the first one you can use a regular check valve but from research that i've done they said a spring valve here is better because it gives you a little bit more back pressure on there so your head pressure comes down and has nowhere to go but up to this spring check valve this valve is held open by the spring that's why it's called a spring check valve allowing the water to rush up and out of the check valve as the velocity of the water increases it slams the check valve shut and it causes a back shock up this way and then it comes back this way and forces that swing valve open in doing so it starts to accumulate pressure in this pressure tank and starts to build psi which then gives you the ability to pump water uphill that is my very basic understanding of how these ram pumps work let's go see how it works in real life all right so we got our ram pump here all taped up all the threads and everything we got our pressure tank all glued up so this should be water tight and ready to go what we're doing now is this has a one and a quarter inch drive pipe this will be where the water comes in at and then it reduces down to a one-inch pipe on this side so we've got our drive pipe set out here on the fence to let the sun kind of warm it up and make it a little bit more pliable so it's not a big pain in the butt to unravel when we get down there and what we're going to do since this is going to be our supply end we're going to put this in a pocket of water on the stream and in order to keep sediment and stuff out of the pump because if you get something in those check valves the pump is going to stop so you've got to keep that clean we're going to drill a bunch of holes in the end of this and then put this little mesh sock you know this would be something for the end of your washing machine to keep lint and things running down your drain put that on there and that should do a pretty good job of filtering out any larger material so since we're not using this for you know drinking water or anything we don't need any kind of crazy filters you would use for a house we're just trying to keep the heavy material out of the pump we're going to go ahead and drill some holes in here now just want to make sure we've got plenty of room for water to get into the pump we don't want it to not work because there's not enough water going into it there now if the end were to get plugged it still has room for water to get in around the side so this will be a maintenance item this will be something that we've got to keep an eye on once a week or something like that to make sure this isn't plugged nothing got plugged in the pump but you know what no energy cost involved at all assuming it works so i think we're all set up now let's head down to the creek and see if it pumps water so so we'll obviously need to do something to secure this more because in a storm this is going to get washed away but for just testing it right now this will give us a good idea if this pump is even going to work all right so we got down there got it all hooked up and it wasn't working so we had to go back to the drawing board and figure out what happened so problem with this type of spring valve yeah there we go so it's normally going to be resting down and then when you build up enough head pressure it's going to actually push that up the problem with with how this spring valve was is the spring valve was holding it closed and water pressure would want to hold it closed so we took this spring out so now gravity is going to hold it open and water pressure will force it shut and we should go be able to go back hook it all back up and have it start cycling through so we got it running but as you can see it's running really inconsistently right now when that's running properly it should have a pretty nice regular heartbeat to it and the other thing is i had the hose run all the way up that hill and it wasn't pumping any water there so i thought maybe i had it sitting up there too high so i brought it to right about there and you can see the pump actually just stopped get it going again but i've got the nozzle sitting right there and even you know maybe seven eight feet above us it's not able to get enough pressure in that pressure tank to pump water up to that nozzle there wait a minute now the heartbeat settled out and if you look up there there's water trickling out now what do you know guys we got it to work we've got running water at least 30 feet up above the creek bed bottom i'll show you what i did or at least what i think i did to fix the problem why it wasn't running properly before so all i did to get this to run smoother and to be able to pump water all the way up to the top of the hill was i think in the line in the driveline here there was some air so in order to purge all that air all you have to do is just hold this valve open like this and eventually let it run long enough all of that water will or all that air will purge out of that line and then it'll start running smoother more steady heartbeat and actually the slower it runs like this i think that's what's able to power it up that hill because you get that water moving at a higher velocity which builds more pressure in the pressure tank and then it's able to pump it all the way up the hill if your pump is cycling too fast that means that your valve is opening and closing too fast and you're not allowing your water to build up a lot of velocity here before it slams that shut and you're losing some of your water hammer effect the longer that valve stays open the more water or the more velocity that water gets the harder that water hammer is and it builds more pressure in that tank but if you look down there about 30 feet that's just an estimate i have no idea exactly how far it is but i'm thinking it's somewhere between 25 and 30 feet down is the ram pump and we are pumping water up this hill with nothing more than the power of flowing water and a pressure tank to store that energy and push it up through this black hose and into our storage tank now the thought here is once we get it up here from this point down to the pond is all downhill so we will feed this ibc tote with water and then we'll put another hole in this side of the ibc tote and just let gravity do its thing and run a line down that way but what i want to do now is i want to get a measurement of what our flow is because i'll be honest from all the videos that i watched on youtube this is the best flow that i think i've seen okay so i've got my timer here i want to see how long it takes to fill up one gallon and we'll see what comes first either a full gallon or the one minute mark and then we can extrapolate out how many gallons per minute we're getting and get a rough idea of what we can use to feed the pond here so let's see [Applause] 45 seconds to fill that one gallon jug all right so let's do some quick math here if we are getting 1.33 gallons per minute if we multiply that by 60 that means that we are getting about 79.8 gallons per hour if we multiply that by 24 we are getting roughly 1915 gallons per day and if we multiply that by 365 we're getting about 700 000 gallons per year into the pond with this ram pump i don't know if i mentioned this before but all of the components of this ram pump are one and a quarter inch until you get to the delivery pipe i've got the delivery pipe reduced down to a one-inch pipe and another thing that i wanted to mention is i got all the components to this ram pump over the counter at my local plumbing store and i'll tell you one thing i did not go to home depot to get all these nothing against home depot but i know when you're in home depot you are on your own when i went into our local family run uh plumbing store somebody was behind the counter i said hey i want to build a ram pump and they knew exactly what i was looking for they said ah let's start with the check valves and they went and picked out everything i needed in about i don't know three minutes it was completely amazing i've never had customer service like that before in my life so i will definitely be patronizing their business a lot more if i have any future plumbing needs so anyway yeah just my little psa to shop local so i think before i can go any further i'm gonna need to get a new ibc tote because this one here the ball valve on the bottom is leaking and the knob has busted off so i don't think i can really do much more with this one and the reason that i can't just take that 300 foot of black pipe and just uh couple it to the one that's already running because the pond is lower than where we are now i think it'll create a siphon effect and i believe if i'm not mistaken that you can't have a siphon on your delivery pipe you want this delivering water uphill you don't want it to be then sucking water back downhill or else it'll screw up something with the pump i'm not exactly sure all i know is i think this is the system i need is i need to have it delivering water at a high point dropping it in here and then gravity feeding it downhill to the pond we got the ball valve fixed on this ibc tote so it's no longer leaking we got our three quarter inch hose bib on there with just a short five foot piece of three quarter inch garden hose and i've just got that feeding directly down into this one inch line i don't have it coupled or anything it's just feeding right down in it's probably all the way down here so it's not going to back up there and then we've got our one inch line run all the way down to the pond [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right guys that's gonna be pretty much a wrap on this video i know that 1.33 gallons per minute is not gonna fill the pond in a couple of days but every little bit helps and over time it does add up pretty quickly like i said about 700 000 gallons per year now that brings me to another point is that 700 000 number is a bit inflated because that's assuming that the ram pump will be running year round which you know all those plumbing fittings down there would not survive the test of time over winter getting frozen and having ice and water inside the ram pump so we will only be able to run it probably nine months out of the year so i don't know whatever that would work out to half a million gallons of water a year running it spring summer and fall speaking of different seasons that half a million gallons of water a year does not account for any rainfall snowfall any type of precipitation whatsoever so all of that is going to help in addition to what the ram pump is putting out and it's going to save us the cost of digging an eight to ten thousand dollar well i think i said at the beginning of this video this ram pump was somewhere around four to five hundred dollars and the only reason that it's that expensive the actual fittings and everything were probably only 175 to 200 bucks but because i'm running it up close to 400 feet away from this creek to the pond i had quite a bit of money in that black tubing to get from point a to point b so that's the reason it was 500 if you were running at a short distance you'd probably only be into it for 200 250 bucks i don't know about you guys but i am just super impressed and fascinated by this system uh it's awesome that we didn't have to run wire out here to hook up electric we don't have to have a motor that's pulling electric 24 7 running up our electric bill it just completely runs by itself the only thing that is required for the power of the ram pump is like i said falling water and the only waste is the waste water that comes out of the check valve and that just goes right back down into the creek so that would be the only like i guess you would call it exhaust of the system is the waste water coming back out of that check valve but yeah it's not going to run up our electric bill it's just going to run 24 7 and we don't even have to think about it i just i think it's really cool anyway if you guys enjoyed this one give me a big thumbs up click that subscribe button and we'll catch you on the next one thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Hometown Acres

Views: 1,208,449

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Id: 2BqOhHcTzeM

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2022