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any other uses for pool filter/pump

 
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Hey all you mechanically inclined types,

I have a small pool filter/pump 110 - 120 v 60 Hz 4.0 A that didn't get much use before the pool went bye bye.  Before I get rid of it I am wondering if there is any thing else this might be useful for?

For example: could it be use to pump standing water from a flooded garden bed, or used in a homemade pond or water feature. . .  ?

Does something like this have any other uses?

Thanks for your thoughts
 
pollinator
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Compost tea and biodynamic preparations both require a lot of aeration and mixing. A water feature that accomplishes this could be driven by such a pump (sans filter); biodynamic farmers often choose to use flowforms, but Sepp Holzer's "monk" or a waterfall or even a hardware store fountain feature would do some good in this regard.

It could be used to circulate water from an underground reservoir through a greenhouse or other garden bed, for annualized geothermal heating/cooling. If not for the lead in them, an old car radiator condensing humidity out of the air on a muggy day might help to irrigate, prevent mildew, and combat heat stress in sensitive plants, then supply that heat back when frost threatens...maybe there are safer radiators that would also be affordable?
 
pollinator
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my thought was to pump water from a run off tank to your garden, or from a pond..also could save it in case the basement ever floods i guess.
 
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joel hollingsworth tell us more about sepp holzers monk, and about the car radiator. Maybe you could work your car radiator cooling system with a bicycle then it would not use fossil fuel energy. We breath out carbon dioxide so maybe we can't be considered a clean energy source but i suppose we would be doing that anyway. We can do gym and cool down the some area or other .
    I found a video of a young woman, engineering student i think, who had made a pump worked by a bicycle. Which did not only pump up the water but directed it through a biosand filter because, she said, it is not just a qustion of providing people with water but that the water should be safe to drink as an enormouse amount of children die because of bacterial contaminants in the water. The biosand filter was even more interesting than the pump.
  The biosand filters are well described in another video
-how a bio sand filter works.- and -how a biodsand filter works animation style- which explain the biosand technique  that gets rid of bits in your water and unwanted bacteria,   The water is passed into a  into a barrel with some sort of mechanism to stop it going through the barrel too quickly. The barrel  has gravel at the bottom and is other wise full of sand, the top layer of the sand becomes a bio filter with time as it as it fills full of slime, organic matter that comes in  with the water and develops bacteria and microorganisms that will deal with germs like e-coli. The sand below will also kill germs it will block their passage and be a place that is too inhospitable for these to survive, because of the depth lack of light and air and such, this is called purification through mecanical methods because the methods have nothing to do with live organisms cleaning up debris.
 No one mentions this system geting rid of poisons like cadmium or lead, if you happen to have these in your water then you need a reverses osmosis filtration system or to distill the water before drinking it and then once you have taken everythign out of your water, you need to replace beneficial minerals thas were in your water and are no longer there . agri rose macaskie.
 
Joel Hollingsworth
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Paul discusses "the monk" as a major part of Sepp's pond system. It seems to be a tube that draws water from the top inch or so of water, way out toward the center, and lets it run down a very steep pipe for a couple of feet, eventually discharging it into the pond below. It's apparently very good for aeration, cleaning, etc. A pump might then return water from that lower pond.

Car radiators are available for next to nothing, and are very good at exchanging heat between liquid running through them, and the air around them. Another heat exchanger, maybe a lined gravel pit or a long run of buried hose, would stay near soil temperature. Running this system on electricity makes some sense IMHO, because it would need to run through the hottest part of the day to do much good in Summer, and for a few hours before dawn to do much good in Autumn. Neither of those sound like appealing times to be stuck at a stationary cycle working out/operating a bicimaquina, but one is a good time for photovoltaic, the other for wind. If you wanted to get away with using zero electricity, a system driven by the heat flow through it would probably be ideal: some Sterling cycle engines could theoretically operate on such a low temperature differential, or the system could be arranged to be driven by convection in both directions.
 
rose macaskie
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if you had a pond or river maybe you could use the pump to pump water out and use it for drainage. rose macaskie.
 
rose macaskie
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  One topic that I keep on bumping into is Brian Whites on pulsar pumps and i have never seen a thread that it would fit in before.
  The pulsar pump seems for one to work like the overflow pipe of sepp holzers ponds that are vertical and whose upper end is just below the water so the water above the level of the pipe, the water that is higher than it in the pond, thats why i call it an overflow pipe goes down into the pipe. Well in a pulsar pump you have the water fall down a tube like that a tube of sepp holzers of some length it seems you would have to dig a hole in the bottom of your pond or river for the pope to go down into i suppose the depth is important so tha tthe water drops down harder and pulls in air with it.  It seems the water will suck a certain amount of air down with it and the water falling on top of the air will carry the air down the tube.
    At the bottom of the tube you have a space a small horizontal chamber the water and air comes in one side and one tube leads it out the other  into a lower level bit of water, a lower pond or a pon dby the river your waer is coming from. and the chamber between the two tubes has a roof tha tis like the roof of a house it rises up in the  middle so that the air that has be pulled down will rise to the middle of the roof and in the highest pont there is a tube that goes up againso the air has an outlet but it seems thare is such a rush of water going through the chamber that some water gets into the tube with the air and the raising air carries the water up with it, which bursts out of the tube with some force and in bursts. This is the water pumped up and if you put a tube on the end of the pipe, maybe you could take the water some distance from the river or pond that was the source of the water use it to water your garden somethign that would be inlegal in spain, at least it would if if your water source is a river.
    A non fossil fuel method of pumping water. Wierd but fun to whatch. you can see it on youtube video of pulsar pumps.

  Another video which is interesting because it demonstrates the force of air as a pump, is  -simplest pump- by neem234. This young lady makes a set of tubes one part of which is in a bucket of water and by blowing on one tube gets the water traveling up a tube out of the bucket  into the next bucket and it does not look as if she has to blow hard to move the water.

   
Brian White suggests you could use the rise of the water and air as an energy source. So energy source for one.  and of course that it is usefull to  impulse water to some place like gto  a place  to water your animals.
  The  video is, - make a pulser pump worlds simplest pump! by gaiatechnician. There is written information that makes the pulsar pump  easier to understand in google . Gaitechnician which is to say Brian White has some interesting ideas but it is not always easy to understand his explainations. agri rose macaskie.
 
rose macaskie
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    You are right about bicycling in the heat of the day. The heat in the day in summer puts me off solar cooking yet alone bicycling in the sun. It makes me tired and feel even ill.
I think i sent my peicce on pulsar piumps without reading yours which maybe you posted while i was writting. It looks like sepp holzer might be using a pulsar pump. I only knew that his overflow pipe worked by being just below the surfaces, that the water that was higher than it overflowed into it. 
    Tell us more about the car raidiator.
    Did you see the video of the guy who ties cooper tubing round th efront of a fan and joins it to tubing that goe sinto a box of water and pumps the water round  the pipes ththe circuit is round the front of the fan into the water of the cox and round the front of the fan again, to cool down hs room. i will try an d find it again and give its name here. agri rose macaskie.
 
Jami McBride
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. . . . Okay so the point is -

I can take out the filter and just use this thing to move water from point A to point B - yes? 
Or I can leave the filter (round flange paper filter) and filter out small particles as it does for the pool - so maybe use it to filter roof catchment before it goes into a tank - yes?



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# Plunger valves not included
# Easy installation - just hook up hoses and plug in
# Filter pump is ready to use with already installed filter cartridge
# Works with threaded style or clamp on hoses



Some other things I'm wondering about are:

Can I modify this to use sand as a renewable filter and loose the paper thing?
And a question for you Joel - what are this pumps limits?  In other words is it just small time water fountain stuff that it can handle, or can it pump up into a storage tank 6' off the ground?

Just so you know I do not have a radiator, I do have this filter/pump and I'm wondering about how I can use it for homestead purposes and not swimming pool purposes, and what the possibilities for it's use might be.

Thanks for all your ideas!

 
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I understand that pumps have a harder time drawing up water then pushing up water.  6' only accounts for 2.6 PSI (google 'psi per foot of head').  The one time I hand to buy a pump there were height limit specifications in owners manuals.  Sorry no answer, but bits of info.
 
rose macaskie
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  The sand filter is just a barrel full of sand with a bit of gravel at the bottom, or in the thread   -how bio sand filter works- samaritans purse a bin they have made of concrete filled with sand to purify the water of bacterial contaminants in Africa were they need it. A  tall thinnish concrete box. Your pump should be usefull with such a filter to pump water into the top 0of the b9oo so it could filter down from some other place.

  The other possibility is to have a water collector, for the water from your roof say, held up at a higher level than your sand filter and then the water would not need to be pumped up and that would correspond to the permaculture principal, hold the water up as high as possible as long as possible, that is a priccipal for hot dry countries i believe. If its kept on high, you don't have many problems bringing it down you just open a tap and if it is kept in a pond at the highest part of your land it will seep down through your land rather than going into someone elses, the person who lives below yous' land for eample. agri rose macaskie.
 
Jami McBride
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Thanks everyone - I appreciate the ideas! 
 
rose macaskie
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  it seems from wha ti read tha a sand filter i smuch better than a paper one if you hace bacterial contamination which is harldey likely in a swimmin gpool that is kept clean with chlorine so the sand filter would make the pump serve more permacculture functions functions that the paper one like maybe cleaning river water for live stock to drink.

    I think joel hollingsworths' radiator would need your pump and work like the DIY air conditioner on you tube. the video of which you find writing -DIY air conditioner - in the space you tube provides for your requests. The maker of the video is sagitaire.
  You would need a fan as well needing to find  a car radiator in a dump as you don't haqve a spare one. 
  the DIY air conditioner works by tying copper tubing to the front of a fan and attaching the ends of the cooper tubbing to vynl tubes one of which is that is attached to the pump at so the pump can pump water from a water source round the tubing which drians back through the bit of vynle tube onthe other end of the cooper tubign into the water source, maybe a river in Joels case which is outdoor, so the pump would pump the water from the river through the car radiator and back to the river to keep the radiator cool. Then you would blow a fan through the radiator and the cool radiator woud cool the air the fan blew through it. I don't think it is very ecological though, you would have to work the pump and the fan with eletricity i suppose, could be good to have a giant cooling apparatus on the terrace if you had a lot of solar energy panels to make it more ecological. THats the good thign about clean enrgy you could really go crazy, you could use energy without feeling guilty about it.  agri rose macaskie.
 
pollinator
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It is a bit large but it could be combined with a reservoir and hydroponics trough, Harbor Freight $8 or so 15 minute increment timer  - bit of Hydrogardens fertilizer and you could have an NFT hydroponics system for growing vegetables.  I used the powdered fertilizes but I believe there are organic fertilizers for those who insist.

I used to pump mine about 15 minutes every three or so hours during the day.  Stuff grew like crazy using very little water.
 
Joel Hollingsworth
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My guess would be this pump is designed for a low "head," meaning its output can't be much farther up than its input.

Taking the filter off would buy you a little more height.

One liter per minute raised one meter takes 0.16 watts. 4 A * 110 V means it draws 440 watts out of the wall. It's probably better than 60% efficient, so making an educated guess, I'd say it can do 1,650 liter-meters per minute, at some "optimal" head height.

Obviously, it can't pump infinite water on dead level, or some  infinitesimal flow of water to some infinite height: the edges of the curve are rounded off, but near the "sweet spot," half the height might get you almost double the flow rate, and vice versa.
 
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