This is something I've been working on for a while, a gravity feed
solar-powered water system
for a house. It works if you are in an area with no hard freezes.
You could also use it for cattle stock tanks and such
any time you need to pump water
It could be a home fish pond or anything like that
As you can see we have a couple of small solar panels here
They are 2 x 40 watts and we have a water tank
the only thing going on the water tank, we have a switch
Let me get a close-up of the switch
This is the switch sitting on top of the water tank. Got this stainless steel bowl
screwed to the top of it to keep water out
and this is what the switch looks like
off of there. Not much to it. There's normally open - normally closed connections
there's a string that the floats are tied to.
And there's a lever that when the string is pulled
a lever activates the switch
Floats are in here, nothing special just a couple of floats.
The switch wire leads down to the panel and turns the power on and off
to the pump which is down stairs. We'll go look at that
Before I forget, the water tank is connected thru the bottom
to a 2 inch pipe that does down this way
And simply connects to the house water system
You can see a red valve there where you can shut it on and off
Goes down into the house there. Now let's go downstairs and
take a look at the pump that pumps the water back up this direction
The wires come from solar panel. Right now they are draped over the front of the building
Not beautiful, we will put them inside if we
decide this will work well. They run down to the face of the building
they come across here
to this little pump right here. There's not much to it
It's a 24-volt pump that pumps 2 liters per minute
which is a very minuscule amount.
The pump intake is hooked over here to the
city water through a sand filter
Back in there is the sand filter, if you can see it.
It runs down here, runs through the pump. It's a diaphragm pump
It's typical working pressure is 80 PSI
It's capable of more than 130 PSI which is a lot
and that is the reason I have a cut-off switch
a high pressure cut-off switch here
This is all out of one of those Reverse Osmosis systems
The pump is wired through here
to the switch, there's a fuse in there. 1 way valve
to keep water from backing up through it and then through this
side and the put back into the house over there
So this is it. There are 3 persons living in the house and so far the
this 2 liter per minute 24 volt pump running on those 2 panels on the roof
The voltage is a little too high, it should be 24-volts
but because the panels are limited to 2 amps output, and the pump requires 2 amps
the extra voltages isn't doing it any serous harm
It's running right now. It's not particularly warm. I am
touching it with back my hand. If we choose to go through with full scale
I've got an upgraded pump, it looks like this. This is
15, no 17 liters / minute however it requires 15 amps of power
So it'll need a lot bigger solar panel to run it.
But it is roughly the same size
roughly the same size shape as
this one. This is our
test. This is our test to see if it is going to work and so far it is working perfectly
I've been really happy with it. It's been running for a week
and no issues. You can hear it running right now
Just used some water in the house to make the pump run. Usually
it fills that 1600 leader water tank on the roof
by between 12 o'clock noon and 1:30 in the afternoon
every day. So yeah, that's, that's it. And that's rain or shine
Again very happy with it and
that's pretty much the whole system.
Not too much to it.
Well hope you found it interesting and perhaps useful.