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  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: Homestead mailing list digest <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Well Pump Breakthrough
  • Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 01:30:29 -0700

Here's a picture of a Stauffer pump. It costs $500 if you buy one of their windmills, $800 otherwise. About 10 years ago I conceived of a way to lift water just by injecting pressurized air into a water-filled chamber, to drive it upward through a one-way check valve. I knew what it had to do, but I didn't know how to make or acquire the necessary valves. Later when I first went online, I learned that someone already made one:

http://www.airliftech.com/Windmill%20water%20pump.jpg

As of about 3 years ago, I found an easy to make the tube seal and refill with water, using a floating ball that presses against a hole in the top of the chamber when the chamber is filled with water, and stays there during pressurization. Upon releasing the air pressure, the ball falls to the bottom and the chamber refills with water. But I still couldn't figure out how to sense when the chamber is ready to refill again. It's easy to make it cycle at a constant rate, but the rate needs to increase when the wind blows harder, producing more air from the compressor.

So yesterday I had an idea to put a second identical floating ball in the tube, with both balls large enough that they can't slide past each other. Now as the water is forced out of the bottom of the chamber, the lower ball will ride downward along with the meniscus of the water, and when the chamber empties it will be forced against the bottom hole. This will cause the pressure in the air supply tube to increase, since the trapped air has nowhere to go, which can easily be sensed with a pressure switch!

The only remaining (easy) task is to come up with a circuit that will turn on a 3-way solenoid valve (or off, depending on which type of valve it is), to turn off the air pressure when the pressure switch cuts out, and then delay for a fixed length of time before resetting, to allow the top ball to fall and the chamber to refill.

The whole thing is less than $100 and you can make a compressor to run it from an old engine. Our wind nearly always blows from the north in summer, clockwise around that offshore high pressure cell I talked about, so even a simple windmill that always points north would work fine, and it can have a simple belt drive connection.

Bill
S. Oregon coast




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