In this video, I will go through my DIY ram pump setup which I have been working on since 2016 and all the components in my design. I started off playing around with 25 mm bought fittings and PVC but now operate a complete DIY Ram Pump. It took me about a month to get the first version working and I had very little help in troubleshooting various issues around optimization. I have come a long way since those first attempts and now we operate a complete DIY system that has much better reliability. I have been helped along the way in the fabrication of this Ram Pump by the guys at MacQuip (https://www.macquip.co.za/).
I moved the original system and sacrificed some potential drive head in the process. I was ok with this because the new system would be able to access a greater flow of water being plumbed after the spillway whereas before I was only capturing the inflow of the small stream. My effective drive head was 6.8 m and is now 4.5 m with no difference in the delivery height. My pump uses 4.5 m of drive head, to drive water up to 52 m elevation over a distance of 400 m. The interesting thing about this is that it easily charges to 8 bar easily indicating this pump would be able to deliver water following a 1:20 ratio ie. for every 1 m of drive head, the pump would be able to push 20 m vertically. I normally run the pump at a low impact low flow setting with approximately 110 cycles per minute but I cranked this up in the video to 75 cycles per minute by increasing the stroke length and adding more weight to the valve. This increased our delivery from 1200 L/day to 4150 L/day. We are only using about 500 L/day in the market garden but we are planning to scale this up so having access to more water is a great asset. To understand what this equates to over a year we can multiply 4150 L by 365 days assuming 100 % reliability (which is NEVER the case). Every year this pump could move 1.5 MILLION liters of water without the use of electricity into our agriculture system.
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• The ultimate DIY RAM PUMP design!
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The equipment I used to make this video:
Huawei Mate 20 Pro
MacBook Pro
Final Cut Pro x
DJI Mavic Pro
Rode Smartlav+
Here is a list of people who inspired me to make this:
NoTill Growers / @notillgrowers
Essential Craftsman / @essentialcraftsman
Josh Sattin / @joshsattinfarming
Hoss Tools / hossgardeningtools
Nature's Always Right / @naturesalwaysright
Woby Design / @wobydesign
Peter McKinnon / @petermckinnon
Casey Neistat / caseyneistat
Dan Mace / danthedirector1
Alec Steele / alectheblacksmith
Cody Wanner / rcwninjaa
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