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
Water towers also sometimes have those support rings and you’ll see more rings toward the bottom of the container compared to the top.
That’s because pressure is additive – the same amount of strength required to keep the container secure in the top third takes twice as much in the second third and 3x much in the bottom third.
So you’ll see water towers with rings around them that get increasingly more concentrated together as all the weight at the bottom is supported by a lot of rings. https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/How-does-Water-Tower-Work-Greenpoint-Striped-Brooklyn-New-York-NYC.jpg
So let’s say that you are an engineer setting up the water system for a town. You have to supply enough water pressure for the faucets and showers etc. Now, the water demand is not constant all day. There is more demand when everyone is waking up and showering and also when everyone comes home from work/school and showers/makes dinner etc. In the middle of the day, there is not as much demand for water. The simplest approach is to figure out what the largest demand is, factor in a factor of safety, and simply purchase enough/large enough pumps to meet that demand. If you go with the this solution, you will have large pumps turning on and off as the demand fluctuates. Large capacity pumps are expensive. What if you could use smaller, cheaper pumps to do the same work? Well if you use smaller pumps running constantly, you can do the same work as larger pumps running intermittently. All you would need is something to store the energy. That is where the water tower comes in. You pump water up the tower so that it will flow down when someone opens their faucet. If you have ever wondered why water towers look like a ball on top of a stick, its so that more water can be stored at higher heights so that more energy is stored with the same amount of water.
Bonus: water towers are often constructed at the highest elevation in town so that the water can flow downhill to other parts of town and provide additional water pressure.
Think of a water tower as a pressure battery. They pump water to it during off-peak hours so that during peak hours when demand is higher than what the system can provide the water tower can make up the difference.
A water tower is simply an elevated water tank (the elevation provides the water to move the water from the tank to the home). The drain for that tank, is what is connected to the houses in the community.
Water may be removed from the tank at a rate quicker than the pumps can pump water into the tank…but that’s okay as at some point the drain rate will slow down and reach a point where the pump can pump more water into the tank than is being drained…and the cycle constantly repeats. Think of it as a constantly reachable battery except water instead of electricity.
Elevated water storage is used as a ‘battery’ of sorts. During periods of low water demand (think when most people in your town or city are fast asleep), there is excess pressure and water in the system, thus allowing the tank to fill. This excess water and pressure are useful for periods of high demand (morning or evening when many people are showering or cooking before or after work).
It essentially provides a buffer so we don’t have to crank the distribution system up to 10 during high demand periods and turn it down to 1 for low demand periods. We can instead run it at a steady 5 all the time. Then we are also prepared for unusually high demands (say a fire at 2 AM).
A ton of engineering goes into the design of water distribution systems….and everything above is not 100% literal, but it’ll give you the main idea.
Practical engineering did a great video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZwfcMSDBHs
In addition to what everyone else said, water towers also are important because they maintain constant positive pressure in the water system.
Imagine if you only use electric pumps to maintain pressure in a system, and one day the power fails. The water system loses pressure. If there are any minor leaks or imperfect valves, contaminants could back flow into the drinking water supply, which is obviously no bueno.
Having a large amount of water in the tower means that even if the electric system fails, the water system would still maintain positive pressure.
To jump in on your question: how do they prevent bacterial growth in stagnant water? It’s constantly sitting there in that massive tank constantly baking in the sun.
Gravity.
You pump the water to the top(big ball) at a large amount, and gravity pulls it down through the pipes, which gives you your water pressure.
👍🏽 I hope you had a good day at school.
There was actually a great video where Neil deGrasse Tyson explained this really well.
[Don’t get Neil deGrasse Tyson started on Water Towers.](https://youtu.be/VAn5xYpbVR8)
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