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
It also allows for more efficient use of the infrastructure / peak shaving:
You can run smaller pumps continuously more efficiently than large pumps for just a few hours each day.
The water towers accumulate water overnight or other times of low consumer consumption, and discharge water into the system at peak use periods where the pumps alone might not have been able to keep up with demand.
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The water up there pushes all the other water down and out of the pipes connected to all the houses nearby
In larger cities, the tanks are a buffer. Every foot of water equals .433 psi. Most tanks are in the 120 – 140 foot height range. Water is only in the top 40 feet. So there is roughly 60 – 65 psi of water pressure. They are topped off at night with pumps. then during hot summer days, the demand is more than the tanks have. So pumps come back on at a predetermined level.
In our system, there are 8 tanks spaced across the northern part of the city. At night most of the booster station pumps come on. The water is pushed from the water plant to the first tank. When it is filled up, a pressure sensor closes off the inlet valve to that tank. Then the second inline tank is filled till its inlet valve closes, and so on down the line. There are always pumps running to keep pressure in the lines. During hot summer days, you can see the tanks going down, starting with the farthest one first. Just like a domino effect. Some areas have two tanks side by side because of high usage.
[Practical Engineering goes over water towers pretty well](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yZwfcMSDBHs)
Water wants to go dooooown the hole as fast as it can. To help with this, we push it to the top of a water tower.
To do this, we simply have a pump at the bottom slowly and steadily pushing water up up and up to fill the tower.
People only tend to use water at specific times and in bursts, so even if the tower get’s “low”, it shouldn’t empty out and it fills back up when people aren’t watering their kids or bathing their lawns.
To make water reach your house, the water in the pipe has to be under pressure. One way to do that would be to constantly run a pump constantly forcing water into the pipe. But a much cheaper and more reliable way is to just store the water at a height and then gravity will shove that water down into the pipes, keeping them under pressure.
You still need pumps, but all they do is refill that tank by pushing water up into it. Once the water is stored up there, the pumps don’t need to be running to make it run downhill to your house. The pumps only need to run intermittently to refill the tank and keep it topped-off, rather than needing to run 24/7 constantly to force pressure into the pipes leading to the houses.
This also gives you a buffer to help smooth out the demand or withstand temporary power failures. If the power is out for a day making the pumps stop, there’s enough water in the tower for people to still have water until the pumps can start working again. Water supply is considered one of the most important things for a population to have access to in an emergency. As long as people can still drink water and wash themselves, they can deal with being out of power for a bit.
Instead of pumping water into every house (inefficient), pump the water into one large water tower and let the weight of the water inside push the water down and through the pipes.
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