The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

How to pump water out of a creek

pumping water out of creek for garden


The pump that we use to irrigate the garden stopped working last week.

Anna found out through some internet research that laying it nearly flat in the creek may have allowed the lubrication for the internal bearings to shift over to one side, leaving the other side vulnerable to excess friction.

Most applications have it working in a deep hole where it stands straight up. What you need is at least a 15 degree angle to keep everything happy inside. I think I got close to this by digging a hole in the creek bed so the bottom of the pump can be at least 7 inches lower than the top.

The other improvement is a large piece of PVC pipe that I cut down the middle and secured the pump to. This should help to keep the working end out of the mud and hopefully decrease the amount of sediment that gets sucked up.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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