Pumping Water After the Grid Goes Down

Here's a video that shows how to make a pretty good basic PVC pump.


There are quite a few videos and plans for basic pumps out there in Internet Land, most good for about 60 feet of lift.

For you guys n' guyelles out there that may need to pump water from VERY long distances underground (or short ones--it works either way) I recommend you Google search the Belocq Water Pump.

It'll pull water up an open pipe hundreds of feet. And by open I mean no foot valves, no nothing. Look is one end of the pipe and see out the other.

It can be operated manually or with a wind mill. If you have a dc motor about as powerful as a sewing machine motor, that'll do the job very easily in a Post Poop On the Prop situation, too.

It'll pull a lot of water up a long way, so it's as close to a perfect pump as I've ever seen. And for so little power...

It's obviously impossible, but it works so well it's been pretty much suppressed & forgotten. Don't let the fact that it's so obviously impossible prevent you from studying it. The guys at the Patent Office said the same thing. At first. Several patents have been issued, all long expired by now.

It's VERY easy to build.

The more advanced models have a simple foot valve to make pumping easier to start,but that's not mandatory, if I remember right.

Have fun, y'all and a free cocoanut full of Mint Tequila goes to the first Monkey out there that actually builds one...

 

Thanks, ghrit.

I have thought about why the Belocq pump never achieved common usage. I think it has to do with the fact that is is so simple, and requires only a very small motor. Accordingly, it would be cheap and easy to build and install--which from a commercial standpoint can be very bad. It means the well companies wouldn't make much money off of each installation. Better to push something expensive and prone to failure in order to boost that bottom line and keep those service calls comin' in.

Indeed, no one that has a successful business building water pumps is going to shut that business down and lose their livelihood just because a better pump got invented. Instead, they'd fight by fair means and foul to keep their little red wagon from getting kicked over. Ignore, suppress, obfuscate, lie like a dog, and buy politicians if necessary. Anything to stay on top.

Then again, Society only railroads when it's time to railroad. Maybe, from a survival perspective, it's time for the Belocq pump to come into common usage.

Then, too, you have to prime the pump to make it work. That's no big deal with a 1/2" diameter pipe (1 gal per 100') but it might scare some people. That's no typo: the Belocq Pump works with a one-half inch diameter well pipe. To produce about 1,000 gallons per hour.

I had misremembered--even the simplest Belocq Pump has a foot valve at the bottom and a relief valve at the outlet.

The open pipe bit came from the patent guys who dropped weights down a demo pump to prove there was secret machinery inside the pipe--only to prove there wasn't.

A major advantage of the Belocq Pump is that after pumping water 400' feet straight up from a deep well, it can just as easily pump it up another 100' into a storage container (up the mountain!) where simple gravity would give it a 40 psi head. Just like "ciddy-wautur", except without the chlorine and monthly service charges.

If you have the necessary terrain.

Now, if you want a simple recipe for a Belocq Pump, hook a 2" dia. piston with a 1-3/16" stroke to a 180 rpm motor, and tee it into a 1/2" water pipe however long you need. PVC might work, but I don't know for sure. Copper, iron, or Aluminum pipe would definitely work.

With each stroke of the piston you'll get about 17 times as much water out as would be expected.

So, the area of the piston would be 3.1415 sq ins. The working volume of the piston chamber would be 3.730 cubic inches.
Pumping at 180 rpm gives you 674.1cubic inches per minute. That comes out to 40,446 cubic ins. per hour, which X 17 becomes 687,582 cubic ins. per hour.
One gallon has 231 cubic inches, so that comes out to 2,976.54 gallons per hour.

If that's actually the theoretical maximum, you only need to pump at about 1/3 efficiency to get your 1,000 gallons per hour.

YMMV. But even if you only get a crummy 100 gallons per hour, it sure beats suckin' a dry straw.

Reduce a 2" copper tee to 1/2" at each end. Add an aluminum downpipe of the desired length with a ball valve at the bottom end.
Install a spring-loaded relief valve in the outlet at the top of the Tee. Install the piston and cylinder in the center of the tee and hook the relief valve to the motor so it opens and closes automatically--and yer good to go.

Don't forget to put a sand filter at the bottom of the pipe. Just sayin'.

Some interesting thoughts have occurred. I'll post more later.

 

There is a very simple way to pump water up from any distance you like:

Hang a rigid pipe down your well with a filtered check valve at the bottom
Run a flex hose from the top of the rigid pipe to any chosen line or container.
Shake the rigid pipe up & down with a 2-stage mechanical oscillator.

The weight of the rigid pipe wouldn't matter, nor the water load in the pipe.

The swinging weight would merely need to be in proportion to the loaded weight of the far end of the beam.

No reason you can't have a 400' long X 4" diameter iron pipe shaker pump if the weight isn't a problem.

Just a matter of building to scale.

 

Yeah, shaking a ton of wellpipe would be a real neat trick. Especially if it was supposed to work flawlessly for twenty years.

 

Depending upon where your water will be coming from, this might be an option. (Better done, of course) using the existing animals as your pump motor.

 

Sorry, I'll put my physics hat on for you, it's impossible to pull water any higher than 14.7 lbs (atmospheric pressure, at sea level). Why you ask, because it vaporizes, you've made a cloud, it's really hard to pump a cloud. Most well drillers will tell you that you can't pump using an above ground pump, like a pitcher pump more than 25', theoretically the limit is really around 32 feet, I can do the math for you if you would like.

Rancher

 

So anyone have an alternative that you think works?

 

Well pumps.

That's close to what I had in mind. But not so complex.

I guess just about everyone has seen those shaker siphon hoses that are used to acquire gasoline out of a car without suckin' up a lungful.

Stick it in, shake it until it fills with gas, then lean it over to start it siphoning.

Ignore the siphoning part: the bottom the the shaker hose is a shaker pump.

Now consider a slightly larger one: 100' ft long, 3/4" inch in diameter. Ball valve at the bottom. Gorilla handgrip at the top.

Let's say you drop it 100 ft to the water, then another 10 feet down for good measure, and run it up six feet above ground at the top. That's 116' of pipe.

Now, if you have 116' of 3/4" Schedule 80 pvc pipe, at 0.289 lbs/ft, you have 33.5 lbs of pipe. Not really all that heavy.

By the time you have a 106 ft column of water flowing out of the top end, you're lifting about 595.40378802614486803135057721666 cubic inches of water.

Approximately.

That's based on the 0.772 id of schedule 80, which equates to a surface area of 0.46808 square inches, multiplied by 106 ft, and multiplied again by12 for the inches in each foot.

That doesn't include the 10' of water in the bottom of the pipe because it's floating. So the water column is only 106 ft.

And since water weighs 0.036127 lbs/cu. in., that column of water will weigh 21.51 lbs.

Add the weight of the pipe and you're shaking 55.01 lbs up & down.

Now if you start down-stroking it 36", once it gets all filled up it will begin pouring out a 36" column of water with each downstroke.

That's 16.85088 cu. in. per stroke. That's 13.7 strokes per gallon of output.

If a down stroke takes 5 seconds, and the same for the up-stroke, you have 10 seconds per stroke, and 137 seconds per gallon.

And there's 3600 seconds in an hour. So you're pumping 26.277 gallons per hour.

Now let's look at the energy involved.

Instead of having a Gorilla shake it, let's say you hook the pipe up to a crankshaft and a flywheel, and set the flywheel spinning.

All the weight falling down gets converted into an identical upward force courtesy inertia and the crankshaft. That includes the weight of the pipe and the weight of the 106 ft column of water.

The only losses would be friction of the pipe in the water, friction at the crankshaft bearings, friction of the water crawling up the pipe, and air friction for everybody.

All of those would be rather small, so I'll just ignore them. The point is that it would be fairly easy to pump.

The net work would be to lift 26.277 gallons of water a distance of 106 feet each hour.

A gallon of water weighs 8.345404 lbs.

26.277 gallons weighs 219.292 lbs.

Raised 106 feet, every hour, that's 23244.97 ft-lbs of work per hour.

Divided x 3600 to get down to the per seconds and it's 6.457 ft-lbs/sec.

1 hp = 550 ft-lb/sec.

Honk! Honk! A 0.012-hp motor could do the job. (Geared to the flywheel correctly, of course.)

Most sewing machine motors, at 1/10 hp, are about 8.3 times stronger.

So you hook up an old Singer sewing machine motor, properly geared to use all of it's power, and suddenly you're pumping about 218.975 gallons per hour.

Or 3.65 gallons per minute. Which isn't too shabby.

Now, having spun my physics hat around a few times, let me put it on backwards and go back to the original "no electricity" scenario.

Set up a 2-stage mechanical oscillator large enough to output 1/8th of a horsepower, and you're gold for water.

(Your personal input would be much less.)

How big would the oscillator have to be? Not very big. Read up on the one that wrecked the inventor's concrete floor. That probably involved a lot more than 1/8th of a horsepower, and it was not a large device..

It's true that a vacuum pump will not raise water more than about 25 ft.

But a shaker pump will. It doesn't rely on vacuum pressure. Or electricity.

And it gets fiendishly efficient when hooked up to a 2-stage mechanical oscillator.

As for the Bellocq Pump, it was demonstrated to the US Patent Office with an 80-ft lift. Probably because that was the tallest building readily available. It doesn't rely on vacuum pressure either.

 

Perhaps there is someone out there in the Big, Wide, World that has a capped off well and an inclination to make unusual machines.
And a little time and money to spare. They could even whip up a YouTube video and maybe make a half-cent a view if it got popular.

That's $5,000.00 per million views. Call it a week if it went viral.

But I don't really expect anybody to make either a Belcoq Pump, a Shaker Pump, or a 2-Stage Mechanical Oscillator--not until the instant they discover they have to Do Something or they're Gonna Die.

Necessity may be the Mother of Invention, but you can damn sure bet that Desperation is the Daddy.

 

Oh--one other thing. You don't really need either 2-stage Mechanical Oscillator or a Flywheel & Crankshaft to make a Shaker Pump work.

You can just attach it to one end of a , and put the fat kid (55.01 lbs heavier) on the far end. Then he and the skinny kid can play the water right up out of the ground.

 

Jet pumps will only pump from deeper than 32 feet if it's a deep well jet, i.e. the jet is at the bottom of the shaft.

 

Then there's the perennial idea of putting generators in the soles of shoes. Works great--except it steals all the energy you recover in normal walking so you feel like you're trudging uphill in sand with every step. Plus they take the top end off your sprint in a big way. Definitely not a good idea for combat boots.

 

i can pump water with a 32 foot sutcion hose just put a foot valve on it to prime it and prime it!

maybe we are talking about 2 different types of jet pumps but all you have to do is put a foot valve on the hose ...