OP 4 - Hydraulic Ram Pump

Output Specification                                                         

Introduction                                                                        

Report                                                                                    

Output Process Reflection                                                

Appendix           

            This is my project on creating a gravity fed water system that uses no electricity.  It entails putting a water storage tank a couple of hundred feet above our property on the neighbor’s property.  Our neighbor, Tom, has steal casing in his well that has begun to rust, and must get his drinking water from an outside source.  We can help him out by filling a 2000-gallon tank next to his house with fresh spring water.  While we are continually adding energy reducing technologies to the site, this project also aims to reduce our energy consumption for pumping water. We plan on filling the tank with a simple technology called a hydraulic ram.  We have a small spring that is already hooked up to a working ram system. It will allow us to pump about 200-500 gallons of water per day without electricity.  Because it is so far above our homes and gardens we should have enough pressure to run sprinklers, although, some of the irrigation will be set up to run on a drip system.  This project will reduce the amount of energy that we use for pumping water out of our well and will also relieve some of the stress on our well and the aquifer.  It offers a collaborative project for two neighboring properties.  This project also offers the ability to demonstrate an appropriate technology that could be more widespread.  The Output Packet will include all of the planning involved with this project.  A description of the existing infrastructure will be included as well as a detailed description of parts needed.  It will be complete with an estimated labor and parts cost.  Even though the labor will be donated and some of the infrastructure is already in place, I want to learn more about installing a whole system.  So I will be explaining the system in its entirety.  I will create a map of the system on Google Sketchup, which will require me learning the software. I will describe the technology and our process in detail.  This output packet can be read straight through and you may or may not choose to follow the links provided as they arise.  There will be several short videos of the different components of the system including a virtual tour, watch them when prompted to. 

Anyone with access to a spring, stream, or river can take advantage of the hydraulic power provided by flowing water to pump some of the water to a higher point from which it started.  A hydraulic ram pump can do just that.  With only two moving parts, no electricity required and the relatively easy maintenance it is a wonder why this technology is not more widespread.  Our site has a market garden and several food forests that require irrigation and currently watered by pumping water from our well.  With a spring on site that provides between 3-5 gallons of water per minute, it offers the opportunity to install a hydraulic ram pump system to reduce our energy consumption.  We can fill a tank high on the hill that will be a source of domestic water for our neighbor.  Instead of having to fill his water jugs at our house and haul them to his house, Tom can have good fresh drinking water right from his tap.  We will have a gravity fed source for irrigating the food forests and market gardens at our site.

 Here I explain the basics of how they work, this description is based on Wikipedia site.  There are only 2 moving parts in the whole ram pump, a waste valve and a check valve, so it makes maintenance very easy.  Initially you need a water source that you can harness in a pipe flowing downhill.  This is your inlet and your supply or drive pipe for the system (1).  When the waste valve (4) is open, water flows freely (2) down the drive pipe and past the waste valve until the friction it creates closes the waste valve.  The water hammer that is created from the suddenly stopped column of water forces open the delivery/ check valve (5), pressurizes the pressure tank (6) and pushes water up the delivery pipe (3) until it runs out of speed and the check valve closes when the water reverses.  The waste valve reopens and the process starts all over again.

This Hydraulic Ram image was originally uploaded by Gutza at en.wikipedia in 2005 with subsequent functional corrections made by Sonett72 on Wikemedia commons.  It is made available for use with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.  

A portion of the water is lifted to a higher point than where it started and can be used to irrigate, and/or drink depending on the quality.  The amount of water that can be pumped is relative to the supply head.  An animated rendition of a pump and its use can be found at this link, meribah pumps.  Insert you tubevideosofourrampump.  If you want to find out how much water you can pump with a hydraulic ram to a desired height you only need to find out a few variables.  Our ram pump is a Rife ram pump, they have been making them since 1884 and are still in business today.  The pump we have is very old, somewhere between 80 and 100 years old and works fine.  If you feel like you might have the potential for a ram pump system Rife offers some steps to determining what size ram you might want to use.  You need to determine the available flow of water, the vertical fall in feet (the power head), and the vertical rise for the desired destination.  To “easily figure out the amount of water a Ram should deliver to you (D).  Multiply the available flow in gallons per minute (V) by the vertical fall in feet (F), divide by the vertical elevation (E), and multiply the result by 60%, the normal efficiency of a Rife Ram installation: V x F/E x .6 = D.”  The following description was modified from the book Other Homes and Garbage (Leckie et. al 1975) and a few other sources.  Q_p/Q₈ =(H₈/H_p)e will give you the amount of water that can be pumped from your ram pump to your storage tank.  Q_p is the amount of water pumped to a new location (gal./min.); Q8 is the amount of water that supplies the ram (gal/min.) H_p is the pumping head, the vertical distance from the storage tank to the ram (ft.); H₈ is the power head or the vertical distance between the supply source and the ram (ft.); e is how efficient the ram runs, which can be up to 80%.  These are two of several equations that I came across all coming to the same answer.  They are pretty much the same equation, just written differently.  I decided to go with the first one I mentioned.  

If you look at the virtual tour you can see in the initial frames that there are two drainages that join on the property.  This helps create a high water table, enough to produce a spring on site.  Perfect for a ram pump system.  Our ram pump has actually been in place for almost a decade.  So most of the infrastructure is already in place. We originally dug out the spring and installed a spring box and the drive pipe for the ram, filling it with drain rock and then burying the spring, in the virtual tour this is the spring source.  Then it runs down to a standpipe.  Some ram pump systems will need a standpipe if the drive pipe is longer than the maximum recommended length.  Ours is several hundred feet from the source of the spring so we have a standpipe closer to the ram to reduce the loss of energy from friction, this standpipe is the power head.   The top of the standpipe is 18.9 feet above the ram pump.  3.75 gallons a minute flow into the ram. Irrigation pipe from the spring to the ram and from the ram up to the fountain and then to the pump house is in place and working.

The fountain runs all the time.  In the winter when we lose power we can hook the ram pump system into our pump house and have pressurized running water when we don’t have power. It has worked well during its lifetime.  Only stopping when the water flow has changed, then it only needs minor adjustment to allow it to run again. This project is about extending and enhancing the use of the hydraulic ram. The virtual tour will show you the ram pump system from the spring source, to the stand pipe/power head, the ram pump, the fountain, the well pump house and the storage tank site.

Following is a video tour of the system as it exists and proposed additions.

            Now begins the project of making the ram pump work for us even more.  I’ll start by further describing some needs that the ram pump can fulfill.  My neighbor, Tom, has a rusty well and would like fresh drinking water in his plumbing, and will only use his well for outdoor purposes and emergencies.  The American Water Works Association lists an average per capita indoor water use is around 63 gallons.  In one week this equates to 441 gallons.  Tom will make sure he will use less than the average per capita by installing low flow shower and toilet and any other water use reduction strategies.  The ram pump has the potential to pump much more than the average per capita water use per day so there will definitely be more than he needs. The market gardens and orchard on this site use 500-3000 gallons of water/week.  Our needs fluctuate with the weather and if we are planting or not.  Currently, we use electricity to pump water out of our well to irrigate, but we would like to reduce our energy consumption, as well as reduce our use of the well water.  

            On August 30^th, 2011 when we tested the ability to pump water to the desired height.  Since I didn’t know the elevation change I figured if I ran a hose up to the desired destination I could time it and find the elevation change through one of the equations I found.  We measured about 2.5 cups/minute at the tank site while the fountain was measuring at about 4 cups a minute.  This equates to about 225-gallons/ day and 1,575 gallons per week at the tank site, and 360-gallons/ day at the fountain. It is important to note that there is much less water flowing through the ram pump at this time of the year. It is recommended to calculate the flow of the ram at the driest time of the year, so this is perfect timing. So when I tried to plug in the numbers for the tank site I didn’t think it was working out right.  I had all of the variables except for the elevation rise from the ram to the tank site.  But when I tried to solve the equation to find out the elevation the calculation for elevation rise seemed way too high for the actual elevation change.  Recall the equation V x F/E x .6 =D from earlier, put in our numbers and you get, 3.7gpm x 18.9/E x.6 = .15gpm.  When I solved for the elevation change (E) I got 210 feet.  Wait, this isn’t correct?  That is definitely not the elevation change.  I measured .156gpm when I timed how much water was pumped to the tank site.  What was wrong?  I had to figure out the lift in elevation from the ram pump up to the tank site to make sure my efficiency was 60%.  I measured 20psi as the difference in pressure in the irrigation pipes from the ram to the well pump. There is a half-pound of pressure for each foot in elevation change of a column of water.  So we had a 40-foot elevation rise from the ram pump to the well pump house.  Now all I needed to do was find the elevation change from the pump house to the tank site and I could double-check my calculations.  Taking multiple measurements, I used a laser level and a tape measure to get the elevation change from the well pump house to the proposed tank site and came up with about 49 feet. Now I could solve for the efficiency of the system, e.  When we plug in the numbers we get, 3.75 x 18.9/89 x e=.156.  Solve for e and we get .196.  That is less than 20% efficiency for the ram pump.  We adjusted the waste valve to increase the delivery and we were able to increase the efficiency.  Let’s check the new numbers.  3.75 x 18.9/89 x e = .333gpm.  When we solve for e we end up with .42, a much better efficiency rate, but still not optimal.  We may need to do some more tinkering with the ram to get it to run more efficiently.   Still, when we calculate how much water the ram will pump in a week we get .33 x 60 x 24 x 7 =3326 gallons per week.   So for most of the growing season there will be enough water provided from the ram pump system for domestic purposes as well as for agricultural purposes.  Even if we can’t pump enough water to cover all of our irrigation needs we will reduce the amount of water that we pump out of the ground by the amount we have left over after domestic purposes.  The well pump will provide any needs that the ram pump doesn’t fulfill.

            There are several pieces of infrastructure that will need to be installed.  We will need a storage tank, a trench with a delivery pipe and the irrigation pipe (one going up and one going down).  Plumbing from the ram pump to our pump house is already in place; therefore we will only need to install plumbing from the pump house to the storage tank. We will need to run the trencher from our pump house to the site of the tank.  It is 440 feet from the pump house to the tank site and we will run ¾ inch pipe to the tank. From the pump house to the tank there will be three pipes, one delivery pipe, a return pipe and a pipe for the overflow.  Also coming back down from the tank to the pump house will be the irrigation feed and a tank overflow There will be 160 feet more trenching from the tank to our neighbors house, which will have one pipe in it.  Tom, our neighbor will need a pump to create pressure in his house, other than that the system is very minimal.  The tank will cost about 50 cents per gallon, and it will probably be a 2000 gallon tank, I found a 2,100 gallon poly storage tank on watertanks.com for about $1000.   We will need to rent a trencher to get the pipe buried in the ground, which will be about $100/ day to rent.  In total we will need to install about 1500 feet of PVC pipe.  From a local hardware store it will cost around $350.  I’m assuming that three people can get the labor done in two days.  Labor will include installing the tank, running the trencher, installing the pipe, and then filling in the trench.  Once the system is installed I will begin learning how I will use the new water source. I expect to have enough pressure to run overhead sprinklers but I will also implement drip irrigation as well as some flood irrigation in certain sections of the garden. 

            There are several factors that influence the sight to have a high water table and a mild climate.  Watering in some sections of the garden can go as long as a week without watering, it is even possible to dry farm some sections of the garden.  Shade provided by tall conifers reduces the evapotranspiration of the garden, and a high water table allows for reduced watering. There is a heavy layer of dew that falls on the garden every night.  Even though we don’t use a whole lot of water on site we do need it.  All of the garden plants still need irrigation especially after transplanting and it helps to keep high quality greens from wilting when it is hot.  But rather than using electricity to pump water out of the well and pressurize it, why not use spring water that is available to irrigate without stressing the aquifer and without using electricity, sounds great to me.  It also offers a direct water source at Tom’s house for a raised garden on his lava cap or an aquaponics system.  There may be more uses of the system that aren’t so obvious yet.  Our other neighbor that lives at a lower elevation than the tank has also expressed interest in using some of the water if possible.  There are also several springs nearby in the same small watershed that can also implement the same technology.  We could have several storage tanks full of water in our little neighborhood for multiple purposes. 

Hydraulic ram pumps are a simple, low-tech way to pump water and store it.  The site that we have installed it on is ideal for the technology and the neighbor’s needs lends itself to a great opportunity for collaboration on a water storage tank fed by the hydraulic ram pump.  This output packet has been the initial stages of tying a storage tank system into the hydraulic ram system.  Once fully implemented there will be some adjusting to using it.  A fully integrated ram pump, gravity fed irrigation and domestic water system will also serve as a demonstration for inspiring others to implement the same technology elsewhere. Perhaps we will even put another tank along the way to increase storage space.  Either way it will be great to have the technology on site and learn how to utilize it.  With a great demonstration I see this technology being adopted locally on several different scales.

This was an exciting project to work on.  One reason is because I will continue to use it for years to come.  I’m really excited to see how it will eventually work for us.  There were several challenges that came up along the way, which I ultimately overcame.  
From the time it took to do all of the ground work, calculating flows, refining the systems efficiency, elevation change, etc. it was hard to schedule it all in.  Not to mention meetings with the neighbor, troubleshooting the system and estimating costs.   Not that it really took a lot of time, but it is a busy time of year for me so it was difficult to set days aside to work on this project.  There are still a few more days involved with integrating the whole system, but it will all be well worth it in the end.