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I'm really stumped here, we have siphoned from much further away ( like 1 mile up and down drastic elevations) for over a month without a break in siphon and this time I can't even get the siphon to start.

I'm using 2" class 200 PVC pipe, just like several others I have done I used a 2" swing Check valve at the source to keep water from reverse flow but more so to just "auto start" the siphon, I am using my irrigation pump that Pre Charges at 32 Hz and low pressure for 20 seconds then ramps up to 60 Hz and 100 gallons per minute so after a minute or two that pipe looks like a fire hose at the outlet. On my other systems just close the fill valve and away she goes, any air was pushed out or bled out with air bleeders at the highest point.

This time it didn't work so I closed the valve at the outlet, opened the air bleed and filled pipe, waited, filled, waited, filled......... until all air was expelled then went down to the outlet and opened the valve, everything looked good......for about 20-30 seconds then.............nothing but a dribble. It also appears that Im not seeing 600' of water from a 2" pipe

I also added a 45 at the outlet past the valve to keep air from sucking back into the line.

The only thing I can presume is that the 600' of water at a gradual drop of 80-90 feet of elevation can not pull the 250' of steep 50' elevation but this makes zero sense, how would air be introduced to break the siphon? All I can figure is that the over all 40' elevation drop can not pull the initial 50' of rise to get over the "hump", I'm hoping I don't have to have a drop more than my rise or I'm in trouble, well sort of but I can go to the bottom of the outlet pond to gain another 10' of drop. Anyone ever had troubles like this?



Also. on this picture I show what appears as though the pipe zig zags but I was just trying to show steep rise the pipe is fairly straight for the entire run

Last edited by Huskerduck; 11/05/13 07:40 AM.
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Never mind, a siphon can only work at less than 30'.........better get to digging......yikes

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If you can fill the pipe with water, the siphon will pull, unless there is an air leak. Can you push water fast enough to push out all the air?

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Originally Posted By: RAH
If you can fill the pipe with water, the siphon will pull, unless there is an air leak. Can you push water fast enough to push out all the air?
Yeah thats what Ive always thought too but it's not true, water in a siphon can only be pulled up 30' no matter what, at sea level.

No matter how much water is down stream water can't lift more than 30' in a siphon environment

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And if you are above sea level it will be harder to pull - not as much atmosphere pushing against it. Also, 600' of 2" pipe should be about 98 gallons of water.

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Yeah I'm going to have to go out on the neighbors property between the firs and oaks, then Ill only have a 20' rise and guess I'll leave 6' in the pond, hopefully trout can live in that mad

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Why only 30 foot of rise?

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Too much water in column will simply pull a vacuum bubble on the top and prevent a siphon. Think of a barometer, 30 inches for mercury sound familiar? It takes 34 feet of water to make a barometer, and you can test that with a capped pipe full of water stood on end, then accurately measure air pressure by measuing the water column height.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_pressure

Your biggest biggest problem I think is trying to get all that water moving before air creeps back up the outlet end. It takes a while to get that much water up to speed to prevent air from back feeding. Put a large bucket full of water at the outlet and submerge the pipe end, then open the valve. Air can no longer get up the pipe. Once the water is moving, the momentum can really push it over the hump.

Best bet is to prime the siphon from the higher water side to get it started.

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Originally Posted By: liquidsquid
Too much water in column will simply pull a vacuum bubble on the top and prevent a siphon. Think of a barometer, 30 inches for mercury sound familiar? It takes 34 feet of water to make a barometer, and you can test that with a capped pipe full of water stood on end, then accurately measure air pressure by measuing the water column height.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_pressure

Your biggest biggest problem I think is trying to get all that water moving before air creeps back up the outlet end. It takes a while to get that much water up to speed to prevent air from back feeding. Put a large bucket full of water at the outlet and submerge the pipe end, then open the valve. Air can no longer get up the pipe. Once the water is moving, the momentum can really push it over the hump.

Best bet is to prime the siphon from the higher water side to get it started.
Getting the flow started with no air was the easy part, I put a 45 on the outlet with 2' of pipe which would duplicate the pipe being in a bucket. I also had an air bleed at highest elevation with a 2' extension, when the water stayed within an inch of the top of that extension, air was expelled, I even put a 5 gallon bucket under the air bleed valve and this was when I discovered something wasn't right. When I accomplished 2-3 successful airless fills I had the wife go down to the valve to open so I could watch the pipe that was over the bucket which sagged on both sides of the bucket when going into "airless state" My fill valve is actually just a few feet from where this bleed was so I had full view of this sag meaning that at highest elevation the sag confirmed no air considering I drop 50' gracefully toward outlet and more abruptly towards the source. Opening the bleeder 3 minutes after system hold would confirm no air had traveled to highest elevation.

when I told the wife to open the valve, the sag would immediately disappear to a perfect straight pipe in both directions ( the Vacuum ) Had I not had the swing check on the source side, I may have been able to poach an egg inside the pipe at the air bleed wink

Out of frustration, this is where I headed here and posted, had I just googled necessities of a siphon it would have been game over and I wouldn't be embarrassed that in 50 years of life I had always "presumed" a siphon was regulated by volume, drop, size, length, type of water being somehow molecularly bound as to create the siphon. I now know to replace the word siphon with vacuum and we're good! With the amount of systems dealing with water and some of the things we achieve here, I am in complete shock that my cranial hard drive had deleted the 30' rule if in fact it had ever been there in the first place.......

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I will add we had a 1.3 mile siphon running for 2 years that went past this very spot, just a little south but the difference was it had an additional 600' of pipe an 50 feet of elevation to "shove" the water past this anomaly, we actually had yet another of these further up stream but the over all drop was 140', why my brain bypassed that aspect tells me one thing, I hope my neighbor allows me to run a pipe through his forrest wink If not, time to make the electric company rich.

I even considered ( for about 2 seconds) running the pipe to a 20' elevation in a large loop on the opposite side giving the system that volume to assist in the "pressure push" over the hill and Im not so sure this couldn't be performed somehow but I'm thinking the vacuum would always break this no matter what


Last edited by Huskerduck; 11/06/13 09:19 AM.
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Interesting thought on the vacuum breaking the active siphon, but I am betting it would only break if the momentum of the water slowed to a point at which it could not force its way up and over. It is not like the vacuum gets in the way of water flow, nor water on the down-side of the vacuum bubble. I am betting there is a mathematical way of figuring this critical water speed out but I am not a fluids guy. Necking the pipe down on the upper elevations may be a way to speed the water to a point it shoots up and over.

I would be willing to bet that if you put a pump on the high-water side, you would only need it to start the process, and then valve-in a passive bypass once going. Would a hand pump be enough? The act of pumping obviously takes air pressure out of the equation as you force water beyond the 34-foot limit.

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If it pulled enough vaccum, any minor air leak would becaome a major one, and possibly wouldn't show up under less vaccum.

That's my thought. I could be totally off base too!


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Yes I actually have a 100 GPM pump tied right into the high side next to the air bleed, this is how I have always started our other siphons, just let her run and shut the valve and you have siphon but no matter what, that 30' rule gets in the way unless you have pressure to push over the 30' rule. One thing I am going to try is I obviously have to get an additional 500' of pipe, I was thinking of trying 2 things here..... get black poly pipe to make this quick, just leave it in its roll and attach to bottom of pipe giving double the pulling volume, if that does it.....great, I don't think it will because there will always be the vacuum.

One would think just just increasing the pipe to say 4" on the down hill would "pull" the water over, I don't think it does but since I need to keep elevations around the 20' or lower I obviously have to go around so regardless I need the extra pipe so what if I add a 2" WYE at the absolute high spot ( air bleed/ fill point) and then attach the the poly pipe and run it down the hill to exact location giving me double the volume "pulling".........I will attempt this because than it's easy peasy, trench, done. My guess is this won't work because of the 30' rule but its a cheap test regardless since one way or the other I NEED the extra pipe.

I really, really hope I can fake out mother nature because walking through 700' of woods with a laser level because there are NO accurate to the 30' elevation APPS or even altimeters available that are within the 7 meters+/-

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The funny thing is the wife seems to be getting into this and showed promise as an aquatic engineer. Heres what she suggest out of the blue as I sat the staring at the pipe like an idiot.

"Hey hon, you know that little circa pump we have on the Water Heater? Do they make those that will use hardy any power and just pull from the feed pipe and push in to satisfy the vacuums desire to need more water?"

Of course I quickly asked her to first and foremost not to add to my already over abundant stupid ideas and then secretly acted as if I was going to re invent the wheel as I thought about her idea

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Had I known this before hand I would have just gave this guy an extra $500 and been done with it

https://vimeo.com/77363259

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Well 1450' later, running through mostly poison oak, mulberries, scrub oaks and Lord only knows what else, thank goodness for cool neighbors! There's no way we could shoot accurate elevations through what you couldn't even see 3' in front of your face but it appears to be going for 1 day anyway.

I'm actually impressed with the flow of a 10' head and 35' drop with 2" pipe. Thank goodness I didn't pay much attention to an engineers forum where I was following a thread about someone couldn't get 600' to siphon. People were saying friction loss, even in a 600' run would be too great that it wouldn't pump enough water. I haven't measured it yet but my guess is Im getting about 50 gpm or really close. Now if I were pumping this water I might experience some major friction loss but the effects of a siphon must somehow relieve some effects of friction loss because of the vacuum. Heck, if this pumps for 3 days before breaking it's better than running a pump

I am seeing air bubbles, mostly in the first 30 minutes as to be expected since I know theres up and down over sticks and all the other crap I encountered along the way but it appears the wall of water is actually pushing the air downstream and out the pipe since it continually gained flow over the first hour

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Glad that it is working for you.

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Originally Posted By: RAH
Glad that it is working for you.
1.5 days now and still flowing like crazy, it's dumping here but I really have to know how many GPM I'm getting so I guess it's off with a 5 gallon bucket in the rain I go......

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65 gallons per minute woo hoo!

Which should increase substantially when the pond is full making the head 2'

It doesn't make any sense it is out flowing the gravity flow calculators by a mile, Google earth has to be way off or something weird is going on but I'll take it!





I may experiment with adding an airline close to the end since I had such luck expelling all air from way upstream in the pipe and see if I can get a 2fer1 aerator out of the deal!

Last edited by Huskerduck; 11/12/13 02:41 PM.
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Glad that worked out for you!

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Cool project! I really liked your quad chopper video!!
What's the plan for aeration experiment?


"I think I have a nibble" Homer Simpson

34ac natural lake



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Originally Posted By: blair5002
Cool project! I really liked your quad chopper video!!
What's the plan for aeration experiment?
Well it appears the flows so powerful that it expels all air because the flow increases over the first hour or so and the first 20 minutes you definitely get air. I already experimented with the aeration a little by opening the fill valve without the hose and it appears the flow doesn't allow the air to creep to the highspot.........I see bubbles almost instantly so I may try and put a tee towards to outlet and put a small airline into it with an airstone creating micro bubbles. The vacuum created by the siphon should pull air.....quite a lot of air if I use a 3/8" airline and this will be at the bottom of the pond.

My other option is just make a fountain on the end but I don't know if I'll have the press use I did when I was siphoning from over 100' of drop last year, I had a pretty impressive fountain when I used 1-1/2" pipe with that system but we paid the power company and this system we don't

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Heres a little video of my wife cracking open the valve and closing it quickly, not sure how much air is needed for aeration but my guess is I can produce a lot without breaking siphon

Air

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I wonder how much flow you would lose with sucking that much air?
I would shorten your pipe and just leave it run over some rocks or something before it runs into the pond


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Originally Posted By: blair5002
I wonder how much flow you would lose with sucking that much air?
I would shorten your pipe and just leave it run over some rocks or something before it runs into the pond
The flow is already "there" at this point, it's already been on a 1200' downhill slope and I have found being at the bottom of the pond gains an additional 15' of drop. I may actually try and make a simulated airstone out of a tee that way I don't have an airline inside the 2" pipe.

Not sure but I think the more bubbles the better but Im just not sure, for a waterfall I lose the 15' of drop and I have tried the siphon at the top of the dam and it slows considerably

Sort of like this


Last edited by Huskerduck; 11/15/13 06:55 PM.
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