Posted: 05:00am 24 Feb 2006

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 Well its been a busy few weeks. I made a few changes to the water pumping windmill, the one based on Ed Lenz's design.

The home made piston pump was originally mounted horizontal, but was getting air pockets and not working too good, so I remounted it vertically and made a new linkage. Its now working much better, any air in the line is squeezed past the piston. It pumps about 100 litres a day, 12 meters up the hill to my header tank.

I also have a 12v electric pump ( powered from the batteries charged by the F&P windmill ) that I turn on every couple of days to top the tank up. There is a float switch to turn the pump off once the tank is full. The wind-pump is fed from a large 5000 litre tank next to the shed. This tank collects rain water, or I fill it with the bore when its dry. The top header tank provides a gravity feed to the house. The whole system works well. Originally the house ran on the jet pump( bore ) at the bottom of the hill, so if there was a problem with the pump, or no power, I had no water. So the new system means I no longer rely on the jet pump, but more on this later.

I had some land cleared this week.

I wanted another pad cleared and in the process remove some scrub upwind of the windmills.

This should give better wind past the tower, and hopefully generate a few more watts.

I also had the Excavator dig a dam at the bottom of my property. The soil is high in clay, so it should hold water. Time will tell, it might just be a big hole in the long run.

Unfortunately the excavator may have damaged the buried water pipe that leads from my bore up to the house. The jet pump on the bore usually runs at 80 – 100 PSI to give normal pressure at the house. Now there is no pressure at the house and the jet pump can only reach 50 PSI. If I turn off the pump is leaks down to 25PSI, then remains stable. 25PSI works out to about 17meters of lift, or about half way up the hill. I turned the pump back on and went for a walk to find the leak, but no luck. The pipe is about 600mm deep, so chances are the water pissing out the pipe wont make it to the surface. Looks like I will have to run a new pipe, lucky the poly pipe is cheap at about $170 for 150 meters. This time I'll run the pipe over the ground, it is more vulnerable, but at least I could find any leaks. I have about a weeks worth of water left in the tanks, so I'm not too concerned.

Glenn