Good news. After a few weeks of work, OxGrow now has a fully-functioning hand-powered water-pump. We can pump water from the stream directly into the waterbutt on site, without needing to carry heavy buckets around.
It was an awesome bit of engineering and problem-solving, using a whole range of skills (designing, making, tree-climbing, research, scavenging, transport, pumping, etc). None of us had done anything like this before, so we all learned a lot by doing it.
We’ve got a few other pump ideas and prototypes still around. If anyone is up for helping out with these, and trying to make something more efficient or more fun, please feel free to try.
How it works…
A diaphragm bilge-pump (Patay Skipper SD60) pumps the water into a 50-gallon waterbarrel suspended in a tree. The waterbarrel is connected to the 400-gallon waterbutt in the garden, and the water flows down into the larger waterbutt.
The main problem we faced was that we had to pump both ‘height’ (about 3 metres) and ‘distance’ (about 60 metres). Due to internal friction in the hosepipe, none of the pumps we tried were strong enough to do both at the same time. We solved the problem by over-doing the height, then using the excess height to make the water move the required distance. In effect, the tree-mounted barrel is a small water-tower, and the pressure of the raised water moves it to the garden.
We’d tried various pumps in the last few weeks (drill-powered impeller pump, barrel-pump, rotary impeller pump). Remember this design? And this one? We haven’t given up on these yet, but the successful version so far is a diaphragm-pump. This is a chamber with a valve at each end. When the handle is raised, the chamber fills with water. When the handle is pushed down, the water exits through a valve at the other end.
Come down and check it out!
Jack
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OxGrow 
