Is the water always up there?
How does the water get up there? I assume pumps but it all just doesn’t compute in my brain.
In: 1075
You pump water up there, and it sits there until it’s needed.
Just like electricity, water pressure always needs to meet demand. If a lot of people use water at once, without a water tower, you need exactly as much pressure from pumps being supplied as people are using. Over the course of a day, the amount of water used may only take 1 or 2 pumps, but if you look that the peak pressure being used, you might need 4. If you have 4 pumps, most of the time 2 of them will be sitting idle, and you need to very quickly turn them on or off to meet demand and you have 4x as many pumps to take care of.
With a water tower, it acts like a buffer. You could have 1 or 2 pumps running all the time just to get water up there, and while demand spikes, it just drains the tower, but when demand is low, it gets a chance to catch up and fill the tower back up. Also, if the power goes out, you still have limited access to water pressure with what was already pumped up into the tower.
Individual buildings may have water towers too (like in NYC) this is because the water pressure I the city pipes isn’t high enough to get above about the 10th floor of a building, so the building uses its own pump to get water up to the tower on the roof, and then that water gets supplied to the people above the 10th floor, and again gaining the benefits we mentioned about using water towers before.
If your city is on a hill, you may have multiple different water systems. One on top of the hill to supply people up there, and another lower on the hill because the water pressure would be too high if you took it down from the hill. (P=ρgh, pressure equals density * gravity * height)
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