Today was an awesome day!

We have been working the last few weeks with Paul at Concern Universal to re-design a rope pump so that it can be used for deep wells, beyond 24 m, where the weight of water, and the losses in the pump make drawing water a very difficult technical challenge.

After providing Paul with some ideas we had, he suggested we focus on one idea, building a flywheel that will attach to the pump and make drawing the water up easier. 
Last Thursday we started at a local metal shop on the fabrication of our flywheel.  Over the next four days it took shape and today we took the whole apparatus out to a site known to be difficult for pumps to successfully draw water up.  After installing the pump and flywheel to the well, we started it up.  Though it was still difficult, after priming the system for about 20 turns, we had a good steady flow of water coming up from the deep.

Our idea worked marvellously.  There are still some minor modifications that we will be making over the next few days, but from the outset, we were able to achieve a flow rate of 24 litres per minute for a 21 metre deep well (or if you had the endurance, more than 1400 litres in an hour).  It's not the best flowrate i've ever heard, but is up there on the scale of success, and places our design within the realm of feasible we were hoping for.
some traditional hand pumps can deliver 1000 l/hr, while a horse drawn pump (i don't even know what it would look like) has been measured to deliver closer to 3000 L/hr.

Needless to say both Megan and I are pretty proud of what we have accomplished, and in only 1 week of fabrication.  One of the modifications we'll be making will allow the user to pull on a rope to spin the flywheel.  It was a last minute idea by our manufacturing guru, Cham, but we tested it out on site and it worked very well... the modification we need to make is ot allow the rope to slip/twist, as when we tied it, it was wanting to twist on itself.

We have conquered one of the most difficult wells  that Concern Universal has in their database.  


Today was a very good day!

Pictures will be posted up soon.