#Thegreatpoolpondconversion - 210314
Saturday was spent tweaking the solar.
We’re gonna have some problems it seems.
The new pump draws way more power than the old one so we’re testing out a few possible solutions.
The two pumps trip the controller’s circuit breaker.
At this point we have one solar panel and one pump connected through the solar controller.
The other panel is directly connected to the new pump.
We’re gonna leave this for a bit because it is working.
We’ll come back to it on a slack weekend.
We won’t commit to anything until we see what the reliability of the pump is.
The next big item on the to-do list is the water wheel and water chute.
Sunday was a measuring and planning day.
There are a lot of considerations and some of them are moving targets.
The water level moves up and down, so the height of the wheel over the water surface changes.
The exact position of the wheel in the water and relative to the side of the pond.
The length of the chute.
The height of the filter discharge (the current white pipe) and hence the chute. This affects whether we’ll be able to step over the chute or not.
And that all feeds into what type of water wheel we want.
Our first choice is an overshot wheel.
The problem is it makes for a high chute over the deck because the chute has to be above the top of the wheel.
And the filter tower has to be higher because the water flow is all gravity.
The breastshot is our backup. The chute hits much lower - axle height (the center) or lower, and is a bit shorter.
And the wheel spins the other way so we won’t see the water cascade.
There are only so many designs.
We think with some clever design we can overcome much of the height problem and make the overshot work.
Off to home depot we went to get the first load of supplies.
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Couldn’t say if this is the same or a different heron.
It walked out on the bridge and definitely ate several somethings.
Probably polywogs.
The Ibis are regulars on the grass. This is the first time we’ve seen them on the deck.
A wooly bear caterpillar making its way toward the field.
We made a habitat for bees on the other side of the field.
They decided to settle here instead.
It’s in an unmowed area so we’ll mark it and avoid it and keep an eye on how big it gets.
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