Here's a little side project I've been playing with. My daughter wanted ducks last year and I told her when she turned 5 we would get her a couple of ducks. That was Feb. 7th, well, it's a long story, but now we have about 22 chickens and 2 ducks. Since we have a little creek running through the place, I though it would be cool if there was a good way to use the power of the creek to water the chickens and to supply a little "pond" for the ducks. I was 1st going to do a waterwheel with some type of piston, but a couple of Google searches turned up some other options and I ended up building a "Spiral Pump". The chicken house is about 1,100 feet from the pump, and at an elevation of about 25 feet. The pump in the video below is my 1st attempt. It works pretty well, and gets me to about 700 feet and probably 20 feet of elevation, but it just can't make it the rest of the way to the chicken house, so I'm going to work on a larger diameter version and also probably try a ram pump. This pump produces air pressure also, so in the future, I may try storing enough air to provide power for air tools in my shop that is near the chicken house. I have read where some pumps are producing 45 PSI, and if you add more coils to the pump and/or increase the diameter, you can get more pressure, but I don't really think my little creek will push enough to build 90 PSI or so unless I make a very large diameter.
I started this one with an empty spool from our local electric company. This particular spool has plastic ends instead of wood, so it was easy to screw through it into the paddles. The paddles originally were just the wood from the center of the spool. I've added a little more to them since then because my little stream was letting too much water by the paddles to turn it. The coil is made of 100 feet of 1" poly tubing that cost about $23 at tractor supply. The pillow-block bearings were free from a friend. I also now have a Hydraulic coupling for the swivel joint that connects to the tubing going to the chicken house that I will add a picture of on the next version and the ram pump too if I do one..
Click the picture below to see a video of it in action.
Here's a small version for slower connections.
Here are a couple of links where I found some info for this:
