This is all fascinating stuff.
I didn't realize there was more than one design for a water operated pump!! I saw a water ram work when I was in the Boy Scouts on a camping trip to the Smokey Mountains in 1958.....I nearly drove my dad crazy when I got back home telling him about it. It was years later that I found a drawing in a library book that showed how the thing worked. I built the first one when I was a teen-ager, but had to run a garden hose up a tree to feed it water!! 'Fall' is VERY hard to come by in Florida!
There seems to be a commonality among the other designs I've seen so-far....VERY complicated compared to the original with many more parts and things to go wrong. Is the performance that much better?? There must be some advantage otherwise nobody would pay the extra money for them.
I don't understand why more people don't use water powered pumps if they have the fall and the water for it. Some in the Carolinas have been working for generations. 8 to 10% effeciency isn't bad when it's free.
In *my* situation I have about 15 gallons of 110 degree water falling 8 feet all the time, 24/7. A properly sized water ram will pump about 2 gallons a minute of that water fifty feet (elevation, 300' lateral) up the hill to a tank that will constantly feed water to a series of radiators in an interior closet that will have a small fan to distribute some heat to the main building.
Since the #&*%*! engineers and contractors put in too small and too few floor heating tubes and didn't insulate the slab at all, the floor heat is nearly useless unless it can run 10gpm 24/7. That takes a genset and pumps.
Since the spring and well water is hot all the time, cold weather is only a factor in that the water line to the building will cool off quicker. It'll be black poly pipe laid underground in a wheat straw bed. Since the hot source spring is between the ram location and the building, I could run the water line through a water/water heat exchanger mounted in the spring to re-heat the pumped water, too. In the Carolinas a water ram will form ice around the dump valve and it'll stop . Mine should run in a plume of steam!!
The goal is to have building heat without burning diesel fuel to get it. In a perfect world, with money to spend on my own property, I'd have a windmill tower mounted over the spring with solar panels mounted on the south side of it to run a DC pump in addition to the wind-powered pump, so water could be moved through the house by one of several means, depending on what's available......right now it's only moved by one of two electric pumps or by a mini-Petter diesel pump.
Before the summer is out I hope to plumb the 40,000 gallons of up the hill water storage into heat exchangers in the springs so that I can leave home and have a means to heat the place even though it cost $2 to $10 per 1000 gallons (depending on genset used to power the well pump) to pump the water up there to start with!
To repair the damage done by totally ignorant, stupid, and iron-bound civil engineers is costing thousands of dollars and years of work!! The idiots *ignored* gravity in their building design but hooked all the irrigation circuits together so it cost me 10,000 gallons an hour to water anything!!
Mama always said I'd end up digging ditches for my room and board!!
