I’ve been busy with quite a few things recently, both at work and on the land. The land stuff has been mostly incremental steps that didn’t really warrant posting here. But I was very excited today to get the chance to test the pond circulation pump in its actual installation configuration. The rainy season has…
Mounting the circulation pump into the cistern
We’ve made some progress in figuring out how to get the circulation pumps mounted into the cement cisterns. All three pumps have been constructed, with the long-tail boat propeller shafts cut down to the right size, the mounting brackets welded onto them, and all of that mounted into a short piece of 12″ PVC pipe….
First in-water test of axial flow water circulation pump
I’ve previously blogged about this simple experimental circulation pump I designed out of a 12″ PVC pipe and a long-tail boat propeller. Well, it took a bit of time to get the motor mounted and everything ready for an in-the-water test. The two slowest parts were machining the coupling between the sprocket and the motor…
Ultra cheap water flow sensor
Here is a picture of our ultra-cheap and easy water flow sensor fully built and ready to use: Fully assembled water flow meter The rotor is nothing more than a cheap propeller purchased from an RC toy shop nearby mounted on the end of a stick. We then attached 3 small magnets between the blades…
Successful first light test of prototype water pump
We’ve done our first successful test of the prototype water pump with a 3D printed impeller. Here is a photo of it running: Full disclosure: I’ve been quite busy these last two days, so this successful test was done without me. I’ve just been involved remotely via Google hangouts. 🙂Kudos to the team! We haven’t…
Impellers, impellers, and more impellers
Since I first thought of designing my own impeller for a small test pump about a week ago, I have test printed several versions of it. The original print looked like this: You can see the ragged edges caused by Slic3r’s imperfect coverage for source material while it was printing: I decided to remove…
Prototype axial flow water circulation pump
Here are some pictures of a work-in-progress prototype for a simple axial flow water circulation pump: After my test of the “pump payanak”, I kept thinking about the fact that it is pumping the water up 1.5m, making the water do a 90 degree turn and then dropping the water back into the pond. I…
Making a custom propeller/impeller
Since I’ve been exploring various pump options, of course it occurred to me to make one from scratch. I have a pretty cool prototype in the works using a 12.5″ boat propeller as an impeller, cut down to fit inside a 12″ PVC pipe. But that will take a week or two to have anything…
Testing out two water pumps
We purchased a “pump payanak” from a local agricultural machines shop. (This maybe translates to “naga pump” in English. Because of the shape?) It has a 2.2kW Mitsubishi motor mounted to a belt that drives an impeller. The impeller is mounted vertically inside an 8″ stainless steel pipe. Thus, when the impeller turns on, it…
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