Waterworks and Jusoda

My father always kept a bottle or two of "mineral" - i.e. fizzy soda - in the top cupboard.  It was permissible for me to help myself within reason, but NOT to finish off the last drop.  So I always made sure I left about half an inch...

My father's favourite was Tizer as in "Tizer the Apertizer".  I am not sure what Tizer was supposed to taste of: it was orange in colour only and sweet.  My favourite was an orange flavoured drink Jusoda.  Now I live in Ireland I enjoy Club Orange which is the nearest modern day equivalent to Jusoda and Oh-so-much-superior to Fanta Orange.

To quote... "Barr began adding to its brand portfolio in the 1970s, including launching a short-lived fruit juice soda, Jusoda. A more lasting addition to the company came with its acquisition of another long-lived British soft drink brand, Tizer, acquired with the £2.5 million purchase of Tizer Limited, based in Manchester, in 1972."  Oh, and Barr are the people who make that evil concoction Irn-Bru.

Anyways - the point of this post is the following picture which shows me at an early age demonstrating the no effort method of drinking Jusoda using the siphon principle:

The car - a grey Vauxhall Cresta with steering column gear change.  The location - Broad St, Alresford.  Wow, that stuff tasted good...

Barefoot waterworks or Jacuzzi

Take a disused and abandoned tilapia project (doubled "glazed" poly-tunnel with 6 ft dia round tank), clean all the junk the fish left behind from the tank, fill with water and leave for a few days in this amazing weather we have been enjoying.  Add a circulating pump and make a nozzle with a bit of 1" copper pipe bashed at the end and, hey presto, a sort of jacuzzi for "free".

After rising early and running 5 miles in warm drizzling rain (first warm rain this year), what better than to return via the tunnel and take a quick, refreshing dip in the jacuzzi.  I invited the dog too but she wasn't so keen: she jumped in but jumped straight out again!

On this occasion it wasn't warm enough to stay longer than it took to take these photo's, but in good weather it gets as hot as a sauna in this part of the tunnel.

Did I say I have a bad heel? - it might just be a burst blood blister or it might be a splinter.  Both are grist for the mill and part of the challenge when running the forest loop.  Good barefoot runners land on the ball of their feet so a bad heel can be accommodated to some extent...

Waterworks and Watercress

I went to a school in Winchester - more about that in a later blog maybe.  In a geography lesson the question was asked where was the watercress 'capital' of the UK?  I had not a clue that it was my hometown Alresford!  Nowadays a major attraction in Alresford is the Watercress Line.

I have never been too partial with green food with the possible exception of peas and lime ice cream.  Watercress as a food item has thus passed me by.  But the watercress beds in Alresford were quite another matter.  That they were used to grow watercress in was to me more of a nuisance and at best a bye-product.

The beds that my past were entwined with are along the Little Weir (extension of Mill Hill) and are visible from Google Maps Streeview and in the pictures below (not my own).

These two pictures are both recent.  They are looking back from very close to the first ram pump location (which is behind the camera) in my previous post and looking towards Mill Hill and Alresford proper.  The Great Weir is on the left.  The footpath to the right is the Little Weir.  The beds are demarcated by low concrete walls and fed from the river on the left.  Note the gap in the foreground of the top picture - the groves either side allow wooden slats to be inserted to control the water flow.  The amazing thing is that these concrete walls - and that gap in particular - look exactly as I remember them some 50 years ago.  We (my sister and I) used to jump over the gaps and wall along the walls.  It was something one had to do every time one was taken on this particular walk.

Thankfully the owners generally turned a blind eye to our escapades.  Of course we were careful to respect their property.  It has always been my principle to respect another person's property when I trespass on it, and I firmly hold to this day that trespassing is not an offence unless damage is done. My understanding is that such behaviour is upheld in English law. If a land owner expressly wants privacy then it is their duty to erect a suitable child-proof fence. It is of course foundational to the working of the web of public rights-of-way (footpaths, tracks, bridlepaths) that criss-cross the English countryside sometimes to the aggravation of the landowner.  This principle is another reason why I would find living in America so difficult where, it appears, the landowner has the right to kill you simple because you accidentally set a foot on his land. Here in Ireland the attitude is subtly different - for insurance reasons and because apparently the Irish will sue at any opportunity, land owners are very wary of trespassers.  If you ask permission to cross a neighbour's land the answer will invariably be "no - but if you hadn't asked then it would have been alright".  Therefore the thing to do is to make sure no one sees you trespassing, and certainly not to draw attention to it, and then nobody will mind at all.   Here in Ireland there are also far fewer rights-of-way across people's land and I find this hard: I long for the English system. Thankfully I live close enough to the Wicklow mountains where you can generally walk freely.

Coming back to the watercress beds - some of the gaps had a wooden plank "bridge" over them and I can distinctly remember when I found the owners had tacked some new looking chicken wire over the plank to give some grip and thinking what a good idea this was, although also thinking it was an overkill because wasn't part of the fun being wary of the slippery surface?

On one occasion my grandfather 'Ginty' was taking me on this walk "round the river" - my sister was not, I think, with me on this occasion.  I did my usual wall expedition and fell off and drenched my (short) trousers and must have come back to Ginty wailing, for I remember him calmly telling me not to worry - I was not hurt, I had only made my 'pants' wet.  Obviously I was expecting him to be angry, for I remember immediately becoming calm and forever after I have blessed him for the way he dealt with the situation.

Waterworks and Ram Pumps

In a previous post I expressed my early interest in waterworks and my experience with the venturi pump.  Another clever invention that has been an integral part of my life is the ram pump.

I had my first experience with a ramp pump way before I understood what it was or how it worked.  My hometown Alresford (the ford over the river Arle) has several walks “along the river” as we used to say.  One path follows a stream on the left, and on the other side of the stream was (when I was very young) what I now know was a ram pump – it looked a bit like a gas cylinder.  This device would make an audible “thump” every so often that, of course, intrigued me as a child.  I recently asked my older sister, who would typically have been with me on these walks, if she remembered this device but she has no recollection.  Perhaps this says something about the fairer sex.  Sadly the pump has long since been removed.  I think the picture below shows the location.

A little further along this path and on the right was a subterranean chamber with steps leading down and a metal door at the bottom.  This chamber is still there today although seriously grown over by tree and ivy, see recent picture below.  It is my belief that another ram pump was inside this chamber.  One or perhaps both may have supplied water to the nearby Old Alresford House.

These two locations are approximately at the magenta squares in the map below.

The ram pump requires no external power – in operation it uses the power from the flow of a relatively large volume of water with a small head (perhaps only a few inches) into a small amount of water with a large head (hundreds of feet).  It is thus ideally suited to pumping water from a river to a building on a hill.  The way it works is gloriously simple.

I made my own ram pump accidentally a few years back.  I live in a large house and I was installing a hot-water-cylinder (HWC) to serve a converted outhouse.  The water supply came from an open cold-water-storage (CWS) tank about 8m higher and possibly as much as 30m distant, via a ¾” polythene pipe.  Not being a trained plumber, and moreover having a degree in Physics and the “I know it all” that comes with it, I figured I knew better than convention and thus committed two blunders.  Firstly it seems a good idea to fit a non-return valve at the point where the cold water entered the HWC to stop hot water going backwards.  Secondly I did not fit an expansion pipe – this was mainly because to do so would have been nigh impossible because the height of the outbuilding was considerably less than the CWS tank in the attic of the main house.  In place of an expansion pipe I fitted an expansion vessel (metal globe painted red with a rubber balloon inside with the water inside and pressurised air between the balloon and the outer globe).

Unintentionally I had created a ram pump.  When a hot water tap supplied by the HWC was turned on water would flow slowly at first and gradually speed up due to the considerable inertia in the long feed pipe.  If the tap was shut off sharply all that inertia had nowhere to go apart from the pressure vessel.  The result was that the pressure in the HWC increased, but as it was already close to the maximum operating pressure for a standard domestic HWC (10m of head) the HWC burst!

Ram pump history (quoted from Wikipedia)
“The first self-acting ram pump was invented by the Frenchman Joseph Michel Montgolfier (best known as a co-inventor of the hot air balloon) in 1796 for raising water in his paper mill at Voiron. His friend Matthew Boulton took out a British patent on his behalf in 1797. The sons of Montgolfier obtained an English patent for an improved version in 1816, and this was acquired, together with Whitehurst's design, in 1820 by Josiah Easton, a Somerset-born engineer who had just moved to London.
“Easton's firm, inherited by his son James (1796–1871), grew during the nineteenth century to become one of the more important engineering manufacturers in the United Kingdom, with a large works at Erith, Kent. They specialised in water supply and sewerage systems world-wide, as well as land drainage projects. Eastons had a good business supplying rams for water supply purposes to large country houses, and also to farms and village communities, and a number of their installations still survived as of 2004.
“The firm was eventually closed in 1909, but the ram business was continued by James R Easton. In 1929 it was acquired by Green & Carter of Winchester, Hampshire, who were engaged in the manufacturing and installation of the well-known Vulcan and Vacher Rams.”

Having read this I contacted Green & Carter and was pleased to get a reply from their CEO who claims they have records of all ram pump purchases since 1774.  Although he did not find the particular I have alluded to, he did find "a large 8in ram no 12591 which we installed for HN Walford in January 1929".  This would appear to be the one mentioned here a mile or so further west and which supplied water to Arlebury House.  On my next visit to Alresford I intend to investigate to see if I can find any trace of these pumps.

Here's Green & Carters explanation of how the pump works:

Sadly missing from this diagram is reference to the necessary "sniffer" valve.  I love the names engineers make up.  Like gusset, hip, dress, skirt, shoe, orifice, master and slave, male and female threads, grease nipple, kiss, etc.  The sniffer valve does just what it says - it lets in some air with a "sniff" each cycle, making sure that there is always an air cushion in the dome.

In this age of digital electronics it is easy to forget the really cool inventions of a bygone era some of which we still depend upon, such as the ram pump.

See also Ram pumps revisted and Ram pumps again.

Waterworks

My title "Waterworks" could refer to a municipal division or to an older man's medical condition, but in this instance I am talking about my inherent interest in the flow of water between different levels. At the risk of loosing my anonymity I share two photos to prove my early interest:  

Now I am "grown up" I have the following recent photographic evidence of my continued fascination: the dog expressed surprising interest when the dam was breached. Indeed my definition of a satisfactory seaside is one with sand that is good for building and a water course.

Somewhere in between and closer in period to the second of these four pictures I remember an enjoyable day emptying my father's garden water storage tank and using considerable amounts of mains water via a hose pipe.  Regrettably no one was there with a camera.  The location was a hopefully unused vegetable bed in my parents garden.  I discovered, invented if you will, the venturi pump.  In my life I have invented several novel machines, most of which I discovered later had already been invented.  More of that in a later post maybe.  In this instance I discovered that I could lift water from a large lower reservoir (filled from the tank) to a higher reservoir by directing the hose jet along an interconnecting water channel.  I managed a few inches of lift and was exhilarated.

The venturi pump is an amazing invention. It has no moving parts (apart from the water itself). Correctly engineered it is strong enough to lift water from a reasonably deep well - where the advantage is that the mechanical parts can be at ground level.  Because it has no moving parts it can be used to pump stones, sand or sludge out of a sump.

The diagram below shows the principle.  The motive force is provided by high pressure water injected at (1) through the nozzle (2). The venturi effect occurs at the constriction (5).  You can check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venturi_effect - the theory says the pressure at the constriction here will be lower than at (3) and thus suction is created.  Or is it?  Is it the constriction at (2) that does the job? - because we want the pressure at the inlet (3) to be low, not at (5).  You will find the book explanations curiously hazy at this point..

Another wonderful hydraulic invention is the ram pump, more of this in a later post.