There is a stream below the house. There is also no power within a few hundred feet of it, and no reason there ever will be. For most of the year that water just runs past on its way somewhere else. I want some of it in my garden instead.
Right now my whole water setup is a 55-gallon drum off the porch downspout. It catches enough rain to keep the porch pots and a few other plants going, and when it runs dry I wait for the sky or I carry water. That works until it doesn’t. The garden has outgrown a barrel.
A hydraulic ram pump is the old answer to this, and it is a good one. No electricity, no fuel, almost nothing that moves except two valves. You feed it a steady fall of water down a pipe. The water picks up speed, a valve slams shut, and that sudden stop (the same water hammer that bangs the pipes in your walls) shoves a small fraction of the flow up a much narrower line to somewhere much higher. Then it resets and does it again, a couple of times a second, all day and all night. You trade a lot of water falling a little for a little water climbing a lot.
I have not built one yet. What I know so far I owe to Seth at Land to House, who has put up more clear, practical ram pump footage than anyone I have found. This is the build I keep coming back to.
The plan, roughly: set the ram at the stream where I can get a few feet of fall on the drive pipe, then run the output line uphill to an IBC tote (one of those 275-gallon caged plastic totes) on a stand near the garden. That tote is the water tower. Once it is full and up high, gravity does the rest, and I can run soaker hoses through the beds off the bottom of it. Seth builds a tote tower in another video, and it is basically the shape of what I want.
The parts I still have to work out are the unglamorous ones. How much fall I can actually get at the stream, and how that fall compares to the lift up to the tote, because that ratio matters more than anything else. What the flow looks like in August and not just in spring. How to keep leaves and grit out of the drive pipe. And what happens the first hard freeze, because a ram pump full of ice is just an expensive length of pipe.
For now it is a barrel and a plan. But a machine that lifts water all day on nothing but more water is the kind of thing I would build just to stand there and watch it work.