While I wait for the various bits of electronics to arrive, I decided to do a slightly more formal test of the pump.

I pumped a pretty much full 5g container up 74″. The pump was sucking air in the reservoir at 2:15, however: there was about 1″ left in the bottom, and the top bucket wasn’t quite full; call it 10/14 * 5g, say 3.6g. I’d say at 74″ of lift, conservatively, this pump does about 1.6 gal/min.

There’s good reason to make sure the pump is fixed standing upright on the bottom of the bucket. That will take a bit of design.

I’ll repeat the test to see if the pump shuts off when it finds no more water, but I’m not sure it does. That’s a bit worrying. All the more reason to have a ton of intelligence (i.e., only let the pump run for 2 min or until there’s 2″ of water in the reservoir. Good thing that the circuit design is well along the way,

Let’s say you’ve got gallons of washwater, and no where to put it. Evaporate it! Devices that facilitate getting water into air are called evapotrons, and Ember is the master of the field. I built one of his wind-driven designs last year, with mixed results.

On the plus side, it did run on wind. On the minus side, the wind has to be blowing pretty much squarely into the windmill for it to turn much. The design is a little fragile, and the pond tends to leak and in heavy wind, splash all over the surface it’s on. I put it on top of a truck to maximize exposure to the sun and wind.

This year I have other plans. I’ve got a couple of 12v bilge pumps, and I will use them to drive water up to trickle over something from which it will evaporate. This, in Ember’s terms, is a “pumped cascade.” More as I figure it out.