How to pump water up a hill?

I know how my grandpa solved this problem during the depression. He pulled the rear end out from under the model t that he couldnt afford to buy gasoline for anyway. Dug a hole about 3 ft deep and buried it with one wheel down, the other sticking straight up. He ran the drive shaft (now at ground level to a pump jack (thats the drive mechanism from a windmill) and tied a long pole across the spokes of the wheel sticking up, harnessed up the saddle pony and let it walk round and round pumping water up the hill to a tank above the house and gravity fed it back down to the house. He used that set up for several years before power was available in the area.

__________________
"Nothing so needs reforming as other peoples habits." Mark Twain

There is always an old hit and miss pump too. With the right pump you could run it for just a few minutes and get a days worth of water into storage.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk - now Free

You are talking about a temporary problem. Usually power is out only briefly, unless there is a wide spread ice storm. I'm in Western SC and am familiar with ice storms also.

When I was a boy we did not have an electric pump in the rock lined well, used a chain and windlass. Sometimes the well went dry, which was one reason why we didn't have a pump installed. We had to go to a spring down hill about the same distance you describe. We would carry water in buckets that held about 2 gallons. Adults carried 2 with occasional rests. We would catch rain water from the roof of the house for washing. It was work but doable. If you can drive something down to the spring I suggest a car battery and a power inverter, then pumping water into some kind of holding tank.

Oh, the rock lined well with the world's best tasting water? The rocks lining the well fell in and we had a new well dug(a story in itself) and a pump put in. Running water is a great improvement over carrying water.

COWS

I've got a similar question. I've got property that I want to build on; the only place I'd be allowed to build is near the top of the property. Down the hill there is an existing well, almost an artesian, as it's about 135' deep and the water stands at or slightly above the surface of the ground. It's approximately 350' run, and between 30' and 50' rise from the well to the house site. I don't want to be on-grid. So I thought the best thing to do would be to put in a cistern, either above the house (there isn't much room between the house site and the top of the property, though), or in the cellar, and use a solar pump to get the water up to the cistern. Don't know what to look for in the solar pump, though. I know with this set-up we wouldn't need batteries, as we don't have long cloudy stretches very often.

Kathleen

This is a perfect application for a hydraulic ram pump. I just built one to pump water from a small stream 40' uphill to a 1100 gallon poly tank to supply 3 pastures...works fantastic.

__________________
'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Friedrich August von Hayek

Would this work with a well, though? I thought you had to have some head/drop in the water source to make a ram pump work, and there wouldn't be any from the well (it doesn't have water gushing out, just standing well above the ground water level inside the pipe).

Kathleen

If there isn't any ground lower than the artesian well, in which to create a bit of a flow, then you are right...it will not work. For the rise that you need for your delivery pipe, you would only need a five foot drop, but if that isn't available, then back to the drawing board.

__________________
'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Friedrich August von Hayek

I didn't read all the replies, sorry no time, so perhaps someone has already mentioned this.

We are in the exact same situation. Our spring is down hill and over 650+ feet to the house. There is a small clearing in the woods where we have a single solar panel. We have a battery and an RV water pump. We built a spring house around the spring to hold enough water to pump with. We tried all sort of other pumps and they wouldn't work, didn't have enough head. The RV pump works great as long as you don't run it dry. On sunny day we pump several times a day to a cistern that holds 1,000 gallons and then from there it's a regular water system, pressure tank, pump etc.

For us a ram pump wouldn't work because we didn't have enough drop or enough flow and would have to have come up with a complicated system of tanks that we just didn't want to do. We ran black poly lines over the ground because the hill the spring comes out of is pure rock. When we ran pvc and had it in the sun, it started springing leaks very soon and we had to completely start over.

We have on our to do list to fill bags with dirt or sand and cover those lines because they do freeze in the winter. Trenching is not an option. We use an air pressure tank to blow the lines out before a freeze.

When there is a freeze for a long time we haul water by hand when we need to. Yes uphill on an ice sheet isn't fun. I've figured out how to carry 4 - 5 gallons of water at a time by using cloth bags and putting one arm through each loop and carrying the water in the front. I can have 3 gallon jugs side by side on my chest and then 2 bags over each shoulder. Though I usually only like to carry 4 gallons to give me a free hand for grabbing little trees to help me get up the hill. Ahh the life of a homesteader.

__________________
Our website promoting the use of Missouri Herbs. www.MissouriHerbs.com