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
It’s for storage, to buffer the plumbing system against the ebb-and-flow of a community’s daily water demands, and to help guarantee that water is delivered to its users at high pressure. The water pressure in a closed system of pipes, depends primarily on how much vertical distance there is between the user and the water level in the reservoir. If the city’s water reservoir were a big lake that’s 5 meters downhill of everyone’s house, then you could plumb everyone’s faucets up to that lake, but the water wouldn’t run when they tried to run a bath. Not unless they used a pump to push the water uphill from that lake, anyway.
But if instead the town dammed up a little lake which was 20 meters *above* them on a big hillside, then they could just run a sealed pipe system straight from that lake to their houses, and when they ran the shower, it would come out with plenty of force – no pumping needed.
Damming up a lake at the top of a hill is an expensive and sometimes risky idea, and sometimes there isn’t a hill at all. So the next best thing is to put a great big water tank at the top of a big metal tower.
Usually, the water gets up there by being pumped from some larger reservoir that’s closer to ground level. Sometimes, if the tower serves a very remote area, it might be filled by a big water-tank truck coming by periodically.
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