When we go camping we usually use a bag that warms water in the sun. The low pressure's not a problem, if the nozzle's overhead. It just doesn't hold much.Bill: Wouldn't the storage tank & 10W
pump combination be the more brilliant invention?
I've extolled the virtues of an elevated tank delivering gravity water for many years. Not everyone has enough elevation to make it sensible. A tank on a wooden platform delivers very low pressure. It takes 2.1 feet elevation to create one psi at the faucet or showerhead. A wooden platform for a water tank must be very strong and sit upon a good footing.
Regarding the compressed air pump, I always think of energy in and energy out. What creates the compressed air? What is the source and what is the cost?I'm going to build a windmill. We have a unique summer wind pattern known as the "squamish". A moderately strong north wind starts at noon and ends at sundown on every sunny summer day. It's brought about by the same perpetual offshore high pressure that keeps the rain away in summer. Fortunately the need to water is correlated with sunshine, and so is the wind.
I suppose to evaluate the efficiency one would need to compare some other pump cost per thousand gallons, say, and the compressed air pump energy source the same.It depends on whether you mean slow trickle into a storage tank, or 10 gallons per minute. It will be possible to run my new pump at the usual high speed, off an electric compressor, but at this rate some energy will be lost through frictional heat and heat from sudden compression. We could call this the "dynamic" component of inefficiency. You can't calculate this, but most of it can be evaluated from the compressor specs (including the inherent "static" loss of the piston pump). It's still hard to imagine that air will have more frictional loss than water, which is more viscous, and the amount of water squirting around through tubes is about the same as for any method.
My cousin who built the elegant log cabin had as his first water source a twelve-volt pump lifting water to a tank up the hill from a small spring. The pump was energized by a battery charger. So it still required electricity. I don't know if he ever calculated the cost-per-gallon of pumping that way. I do know that he later had a well dug and a normal deep pump installed.I really wanted to have enough solar panels to pump just enough agricultural water. I set the limit for expenditure at $500 for the panels. I think that would buy me about 50W worth. If I were to try to run my existing 1000W impeller pump from a battery and inverter, it could still not be on for more than 1/20 (50/1000) of the time that the sun shines, assuming 100% battery efficiency. So for about 3 minutes per hour, I'd get 10 gallons per minute from the pump, or about 30 gallons per hour. For the whole partly shady day I'd get a couple hundred gallons, but it's not enough.
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.