The Hydram - part 3: Springs and pipes
With the pump back in its house (read about that in part 2), next on the agenda was replacing the 50m of pipe which supplied the pump with water from the spring, and repairing the spring so that it actually had any water to supply to the pump.
Once upon a time, the spring not only supported the operation of the pump, providing water to the old farmhouse, but it also grew watercress, and folks would come here specifically to collect some.
Sadly, after years of neglect, the spring was in a sorry shape. In the picture below, the inner rectangle was the "supply tank" for the pump, and the outer wall formed the pool wherein the cress grew. Unfortunately, the outer wall has blown out and there was nothing stopping the spring water from running off.
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| There's a hole in my bucket, dear 'Liza |
After a quick exploratory dig with the trenching shovel it became clear that we'd need to clear out all the earth out in order to see what we were dealing with. There's probably a good 2-3 tonnes there, so we had to break out the power shovel:
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| Tony's power shovel making light work of heavy clay |
With the soil & clay out, the blown section of wall is easily visible in the picture above. This is tricky to fix - if it were a pond or similar we'd simply drain it, repair, and refill. This, however, is filled by a natural spring, and nature had not seen fit to provide us with a stopcock.
After not a lot of thinking about it, but with a good amount of enthusiasm as a fine substitute, we decided to back-fill/dam the outside of the hexagon with the soil, and plug the hole from the inside with the blue clay; more than anything, as a way to see if the pool to fill. Which it did, rather quickly:
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| Anyone for a dip? |
With the happy news that the spring was still springing, and the retaining wall more-or-less retaining (at least enough for water to fill the pool), it was now time to dig a trench in which to lay the new pipework:
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| A-there I was, diggin' this 'ole, 'ole in the ground... |
I had ordered 19m of hot-rolled 2" Tata steel pipe to use as the drive pipe, plus another 50m of 63mm dia MDPE pipe, along with a 63mm compression tee to join them with a short vertical standpipe.
The trench for the drive pipe was, by necessity, and like the original we were replacing, curved. Bending the 2" steel pipe to fit was not an easy job, even with a 1.5 tonne digger to (ab)use, but after a few decreasingly cautious attempts, we had a good shape on the pipe and a nicely matching trench:
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| Drive pipe and tee (tea? Oo, yes please!) |
It's worth mentioning that, perhaps obviously, in addition to slightly curving around the tree the trench and drive pipe needed to have a good gradient applied in order to arrive at the base of the ram house (roughly a meter below the surface), and line up squarely with the drive flange on the pump.
From the tee we needed another 40m or so trench & polypipe to reach the spring pool:
Having re-drained the pool again, we were able to thread the pip through the remains of the original steel pipe still embedded in the retaining walls
At this point, to preemptively stop any frogs/fish/lumps of clay from making their way into the pipe, I constructed a mesh filter out some wire mesh I had left over from an earlier project and popped it on the end of the pipe with a couple of cable ties:
Back at the pump end, all that remained was to dig 150m of trench in the other direction for the 25mm delivery pipe, which would lift the water up the 30m incline...:
...and into the two 1000 litre tanks, from where we'll be able to use the water to irrigate the whips and vegetable patch:
As a bonus for making it this far, here's an additional bit of footage of the standpipe which tees off of the drive pipe, it makes a most excellent sound:
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