How do water towers work? Where does the water come from? How does it get in there? How much? WHY! What do we do with it? Why are they in such random places ???
In: Engineering
Water only flows downhill.
This is a problem if you live somewhere very flat, as without a slope between the source of the water and your end user, it won’t flow from one to the other.
You can get around this by using a pump to push the water – the pump creates the pressure needed to move the water instead of the slope. The problem is that you don’t want you pump working when nobody is using any water as you will just burn it out, but if you turn it off you won’t have water available when people do need water.
One solution is a water tower. By lifting the water up high in the air, you artificially create a slope in your pipes. So your water always has enough pressure to flow along the pipes and out of the tap.
One downside is that you need to get water up into the tower in the first place, but for this use a pump is a good choice – you can turn on the pump, fill up the tank on the tower, then turn the pump off again. Let the tower empty naturally as people use the water and just turn on the pump again when the level gets low.
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