#Thegreatpoolpondconversion - 210228
Saturday we put together the temporary auxiliary filter.
Thanks to the electric sump pump, it runs about 12-14 hours a day, sunny or not.
Since it’s flowing through a garden hose, it runs about ¼ of its capacity.
That happens to match the capacity of the garbage can and filter material inside so it doesnt overflow.
Sunday we dug the trench to bury the 12v feed wire from the barn to the terminal block mounted behind the filter tower at the jasmine bed.
We started splitting the grass with a shovel. Tough grass.
Then we remembered we had an old electric grass trimmer that just happened to have a “trench” setting.
Dragged it out, ran it up and back a few times and it cut a nice swath through the St. Augustine grass.
Back to the shovel and we were done in no time splitting the earth, shoving in the wire, then covering it back up.
There’s not much to see but you don’t have to take our word for it that the wire is down there.
Here it is coming out at the barn, and at the terminal block.
Pump update (oh yes, riveting stuff)
So bilge pumps might not have been the solution. We don’t know for sure yet. One high quality and two low quality have died. One LQ is still going strong on the filter since late December.
So we bought two different kinds of tiny aquarium pumps (we’re limited to 12 volts) to try another approach on the waterfall first. Low flow means new hose diameters, clamps, and check valves. One pump died quickly. The other is still going strong. Aquarium pumps, even these $10 ones, are designed to run all the time. And once we get the solar working properly the flow of electricity should be smoothed out as well in case that was a cause of failure.
Three small pumps vs one large is an accommodation we’ll make only if we have to. It means abandoning all the design and 1-¼ corrugated plumbing and would be a mess on the filter system design. But it also means redundancy so we’d still get some flow if a single pump died.
However…
We found a 12v sump pump that is rated at about half the electric sump. At $10 it was worth a try. It arrived Monday. We hooked it right up to the corrugated waterfall hose. It’s flowing just as well as the very first HQ bilge pump ($48) - around 1,000 gph, so once again the waterfall looks the way we designed it and not ‘anemic’. This one also may be openable / fixable or at least diagnosable. The bilges can’t be disassembled so there’s no way to know what failed.
We’ve got the remaining tiny pump still running to see how long it might go.
Right now we’ve got 4 pumps running. It looks and sounds great.
Next week
- the panels move to the barn roof
- the pumps get connected to the terminal block.
- the battery gets connected to the solar controller
Up to now everything’s been held together temporarily with wire nuts, tape, etc.
We had to pull the controller a while back and instead connect each panel to one pump.
By the end of next Sunday we should have a properly functioning solar system that’s correctly and securely wired and protected from the weather.
Here’s an index of all the postings in #thegreatpoolpondconversion