Tag: hydraulic ram pumps

Dead Prime Minister fails to get it up!

Palmerston – later on and run out of steam!

I just couldn’t leave Wales without a piece on our day trip on the Ffestiniog Railway on Tuesday. Last year we travelled the Welsh Highland Railway line from Porthmadog to Caernarfon which climbs through the mountains past Snowdon (or Yr Wyddfa, if you will) and down again to the sea – a magical five and a half hours there and back, with mugs of tea and Welsh rarebit to keep body and soul together. This year with Covid restrictions there are only half journeys available so we opted for the Ffestiniog Railway up to Tan y Bwlch.

anyone who’s ever lived in a commune will recognise the fact that there’s almost always one person whose revelatory vision everyone else is expected to serve

We’ve got history with the railway -well more of a one night stand actually – because when we lived in a self described commune in Bristol we spent a weekend working there as ‘volunteers’. The word volunteers is italicised because anyone who’s ever lived in a commune will recognise the fact that there’s almost always one person whose revelatory vision everyone else is expected to serve. That was John then, and probably still is. The pith helmet and khaki shorts of his childhood were invisible to most people but always rankled with me and so, with the certainty that winter follows spring we clashed. He was born to be a district agent in the great days of the Empire when Palmerston was Prime Minister and I could only aspire (in his mind) to be that insolent little chap – what was his name again? -who served the tea. Funnily enough he brought two of his admirers into a cafe I was in a few years ago and I recognised his booming voice immediately – I was so troubled by it I had to get up and leave.

Anyway this mountain adventure was an entirely ‘voluntary’ weekend event with the usual unspoken three line whip. Most of the commune members were doing office or teaching jobs, so a weekend breaking stones in Wales was probably more attractive to them, but we dutifully went along and even took two friends – Mike and Di – along with us. It was the weekend I first saw – rather heard – a Hydram (hydraulic ram pump) in action. I followed the camp water supply down the steep hillside towards the sound of the pump, each rifle shot crack sending a pulse of water up the pipe. Eventually I found the source in a walled off dam at the end of an old drift mine shaft, and I fell instantly in love with a machine that could raise water at least a hundred feet, free of charge and all day, every day. Sustainability in an elegant lump of cast iron with no more complex engineering than a pressure chamber and a couple of flap valves.

So that was it really. It snowed heavily and the bunkhouse felt like a scene from a Russian gulag. The occupants regarded us with suspicion; several of them were explosives experts who seemed to prefer to make a cutting through the mountain by reducing it to vapour. Others were living in the dream of the completed railway line so completely they were socially unavailable to the present moment and so like all bored twenty somethings we found our own fun and climbed the neighbouring mountain Moelwyn Bach in our wellies – cue major ticking off for irresponsibility, but the view was worth it! Then we rode a truck down the mountain from the end of the line and lost control of it completely, jumping off and watching it roll down the hill. After that no-one spoke to us, can’t blame them really, and mercifully we were never invited again. On our way back down the line on Tuesday we caught sight of the same kind of (refurbished by now) truck.

But that was then! On Tuesday we joined the socially distanced mini throng of travellers, and an elderly guard locked into our sealed compartments: third class with bench seats, to play with the leather window straps while we waited. Our engine – called Palmerston after the previously mentioned Prime Minister of the British Umpah era was steaming copiously at the front – possibly a tad too copiously as it turned out. The Ffestiniog railway was originally built to bring slate down from the quarries at Blaenau Ffestiniog. It’s a narrow gauge railway run almost entirely by volunteers and they run it well. The line climbs steeply uphill on its way to the mid point at Tan y Bwlch and the little engine was straining at every valve on the steeper bits. Then half a mile before the station the engine gave up the ghost altogether and we stopped in silence. For a while it was like Adlestrop, just the engine wrapped in a cocoon of steam, a few sheep and the sound of the drizzle. Welsh Mountain drizzle could fill a small lake in five minutes; it’s the only kind that you can actually hear drumming on the windows. Rebellious noises from passengers began to mount and the ancient guard trudged up and down the line trying to explain through the windows without having much of clue himself what was going on.

Eventually they sent a replacement engine to tow us up the last section of the line and Palmerston, humbled, was brought into Tan y Bwlch station three quarters of an hour late. At this point communications seemed to break down entirely with railway volunteers on their mobiles and engineers of all genders poking and pointing. A diesel (if I was making this up it would have been number 666 and called Harold Wilson – but that wouldn’t be true) so a diesel engine came along and shuffled two lots of abandoned carriages around the station until they were in the right order and yet another steam engine came and pulled the first train down the hill while we drank tea from paper cups and took lots of photographs under a temporary canvas canopy. Then they brought yet another engine and we set off back to Porthmadog.

I’m not a steam engine enthusiast in the usual sense. My dad was a railwayman and I was born next to the railway and so the sounds of trains been a part of my whole life – they still are, we can hear the engines passing through Bath Spa station quite clearly. Then there’s the coal to think about. How do you balance the desire to see the back of coal as a fuel with these hundred year old engines, restored and in regular use. I can’t see it attracting many visitors if they put electric motors in the engines and stuck red light bulbs in the fireboxes!

Steam trains have all the features needed to become a true addiction; a uniform, a private language (who knows what a top link man is these days?) and a proper set of exams to pass. Then there’s the sound. I once heard a recording of the foetal sounds that are the soundscape we all inhabited before we were born. You can’t tell me the similarity doesn’t trigger an aching sense of familiarity in the mind. But I remember my dad having to memorise miles of railway line when he went for his guard’s promotion. He would put a woollen blanket on the table and cover it with file cards filled with the esoteric language of the track. But he hated the railway, hated the shifts and the hours and the constant threat of redundancy during the Beeching era. So no, I’m not the least romantic about the railways. But I love Snowdonia and I love those trains – a beautiful paradox.

Signs of spring on the green

These were pointed out to me today by our neighbour  – a professional botanist. This patch of sweet violets and celandines are growing almost outside our front door.  We were discussing a proposal to ‘rewild’ a part of the green, which is a great idea, and it’s good to see that it seems nature had the idea first. The big battle, as we realized, is to convince the council workers not to strim them all off before they’ve had chance to flower. I’ll keep you posted.  The violets could be garden escapes, I suppose, but who’s counting?  Sweet violets are increasingly rare in the wild and they’re easy to identify.  If they’re perfumed and the sepals are rounded they’re pretty certain to be Viola odorata. The shame is that in the battle for space, the celandines appear to be winning.

Before we went back on the allotment today I did a bit more research on hydraulic ram pumps and it seems my enthusiasm for their use on the plot was a bit misplaced.  Their efficiency is such that they only work where they’re situated in an abundance of replenishable water – like a stream –  because they’re terribly inefficient, managing to pump between just 2% and 20% of the input water. That could mean that of of 500l of stored water as little as 10l would make it to the top and the rest would spill out of the pump. What we could do, of course, would be to isolate the three underground streams running through the site and pipe them into a giant sump, and then pump all the water back to the top of the site into a 50,000 litre tank  – a bit of a major civil engineering project and unlikely to attract funding from the council whose whole budget for allotments in the city is about £70,000!  I don’t think we’d get away with a hose draped across the main road and joining us to the river.

IMG_20200305_154717And so to the allotment where we were delighted to see that last night’s rain had flowed obligingly into the first tank.  This will be the one we direct to feed the greenhouse drip system. It will provide easily enough water to last a fortnight.  The previous system, which was supplied by the far right hand barrel in the photo was too low and so stopped working after about the top third was gone.

While we were at it I moved the hurdle screen in by a couple of feet to create a new bed for Nepeta, Lavender and other bee plants.  The soil there was very soggy so I dug in half a bag of gravel and a whole bag of horticultural sand to improve the drainage and set the first batch of plants in alongside the early flowering Clematis which, we hope, will climb up and over the hurdle. That created a lovely little sheltered space between the greenhouse and the shed, where we put our donated seat and moved the horrible plastic picnic table. One day I’ll build a proper wooden one but it’ll do for now. Ironically, losing a couple of square metres to the new bed has released more than twice as much space on the paved section so we can create a bigger area with moveable pots filled with whatever’s in flower at the time. It’s probably the sunniest patch on the plot and with the reflected heat from the paving stones it should do well with some chillies.  Elsewhere Madame planted out some onions that we’d brought on from sets in pots in the greenhouse.  We’ve put them into what we’ll have to call Allium Alley for the rest of the season. Our leeks – the ones that were so sad in the autumn – have recovered so well that we’ve bought two new varieties to try.  No fool like an old one!

Water doesn’t flow uphill – does it?

It’s trickier than you’d think, collecting rainwater. In theory at least, all you need to do is shove one end of a pipe into the end of the guttering and the other into a water butt and it will fill up with pure sweet rainwater. In the imagination the rain flows in, filling the tank in no time at all.  But in practice much of our rain is of the 0.1mm per hour drizzly stuff, and so you have to be very patient and make sure that there are as few leaks as possible and finally you need to keep all the pipework as level as possible because water won’t flow uphill. As you see from the photo, my efforts to raise the water butts to the maximum possible height meant that the flexibility of the delivery pipe has introduced a bit of a dip that I’ve now levelled up with the help of a long cane and a cable tie. I won’t know how well it’s all working for a week or so, but a similarly inefficient system filled four barrels totalling 1000 litres so far this winter. But it’s worth the effort.  Water is one of the principal inputs for an allotment, along with recycled compost and manure and if it’s possible to be self-sufficient in any of them, it’s all the better for the environment.

But water butts are one of the most commonly neglected items you see on allotments. They languish in the shade of a collapsing shed; sometimes with surplus water trickling from the top or more likely a lidless dump from a discontinued comfrey water experiment; the best but least attractive thing about it being to provide a breeding space for rat tailed maggots which eventually become hoverflies.  Why is this? Why do we install them with our heads full of their promise and abandon them a season later? My feeling is that it’s due to the very slowness of filling and emptying them. Aside from a season like the one we’re enduring at the moment, when the water table seems to be at knee height, most seasons provide more intermittent showers than satisfying downpours and so we wait patiently until the water butt fills; unwilling actually to use it in case we need it later in the season. Then, as autumn approaches and we contemplate using the water we discover that the tiny outlet tap delivers water so slowly it takes an eternity to fill a can, and the pressure is too low to feed a soaker hose. The dilemmas accumulate.  You can always bale the water out with the watering can, but if you elevate the butt to get a stronger feed you need to be 7′ tall to reach. The trick is to have two watering cans, leaving the second to fill while you use the first.  Alternatively, dripper systems can function well on low pressure feeds – we use ours in the  greenhouse. In practice, though, sadly it seems quicker to walk to the council provided water trough and use expensive drinking water. Watering, it turns out, is a skill that has to be learned.

On our plot we’re planning to store water wherever we can harvest it, but – and here’s the challenge – we’re on a slope. The greenhouse and the shed are at the top of the slope, so that’s fine.  But there’s a big opportunity to harvest water if I build a roof to the compost bins – about fifteen square metres – but they’re at the bottom. So how do we move the water from the bottom to the top? At the moment we’ve got a petrol generator which weighs a ton and needs to be driven up from the flat; and along with a small submersible pump we can move water very efficiently if rather noisily.  But I’m intrigued by the thought of lifting the water with a home-made hydraulic ram pump to move it up to the new storage system. I first saw a hydram in use in Ffestiniog, and then a friend had one in the Brecon Beacons, they’re wonderful pieces of engineering but they cost an arm and a leg if you buy a ready made.  But the joy of internet searches is that there are YouTube videos galore that show how to make one with a bunch of old plumbing spares. I watched an inspiring video of an (I think) Indonesian man making a large pump and installing it in a stream with the help of friends to fill what looked like a 10,000 gallon tank – enough to supply a hamlet.  I’m wondering if I could build one that’s portable so it could be moved from tank to tank …. who knows? – but if I can make water flow uphill that will be wonderful.