So I started with my first pond and I have become obsessed. It is about an acre and is at the bottom of a hillside. I have an old stock tank up on top of the hill and now I want to make a pond out of it as well. I also want to connect the two with a stream, using a pump to pump water up the 100 foot hill to the upper pond and let it run back down to the lower. If I create a lot of little pools in the stream to fabricate volume then I probably only need 5-10 gpm. Does anyone know where to find a solar setup that will provide this kind of flow with 100ft of head?

Cool project. First question is are you saying the upper pond is 100 feet higher in elevation than the lower pond or 100 feet from the other pond? If you mean it is a 100 feet from the other pond, what is the difference in the elevations of the two pond?

Yes, it is 100 feet higher and about 300 feet away.

Yikes! Just noticed you need to get the water up 100 feet? That will take a lot of energy if that's actually 100 feet of head so the following will probably not be practical of I'm understanding you correctly.


When you want a turn key system you have to pay extra for someone's expertise along with the equipment. It's only fair really. However what you want to do is quite simple so it is achievable and you can save money doing it. That said, even small stand alone solar systems aren't cheap, when you consider the cost of the equipment and a battery(s) to collect the energy produced by the soar array, to hold enough stored electricty for up to 3 days if sun conditions are not optimum, or at night if you want the water pump to run 24/7. If you don't need it to run 24/7 that would save considerably on infrastructure and cost.

First you need to find the water pump you want to use, and determine how many watts it will consume. A 12 VDC pump would be your best bet verses a 120 VAC pump, that would not only be more efficient, as the DC volts produced by solar panel would not have to be converted to AC for an AC pump. No inverter would be needed, which would reduce costs.

Anyway, once you know what pump you want to use, and the watts it will use, you can determine your watt/hrs., watts per day etc. to determine the size solar panel or array you will need and what kind of battery capacity you need. You will also need a controller, and an inverter if you end up using an AC pump as the solar photovoltaic cells produce electricity in DC. But you can also use a panel that uses has a built in micro inverter.

Here is a link that will determine much of that for you and includes a ballpark price.


http://solarelectricityhandbook.com/solarcalculator.aspx

Of course there's more to this like direction of the solar panel, angle etc. but the book associated with the website explains it all quite well.

You will need a pump capable of developing 50 psi, because your head pressure will be close to 45.

Thanks! I plan to use a dc pump that optimally will be variable speed with no batteries. That way it will just pump when power is available. (this is AZ so I'm not worried about sun.) I don't think it needs to run 24/7. Just during the day would be fine. Does anyone have any experience with brands or vendors of dc pumps? This is where I seem to be running into dead ends. I've found dc well pumps that can do 100 feet but only 1-2 gpm. id like to get those flow numbers up.

Has anyone built running streams connecting ponds, and would this be enough flow for trout to spawn? Not that trout spawn is a high priority but it would be cool.
I'm thinking if I grow FHM in the upper pond I can strategically release them into the lower pond for forage.

If you don't find a suitable larger pump, you could use multiple smaller pumps. Might be some advantage of lower start up current if you could start them individually, not all at once. I imagine a single larger one would be more efficient though.

Great idea, I hadn't thought of that. Multiple pumps could be a last resort. Three separate systems would not be as efficient but as a last resort....

I personally don't think solar would be a viable option for that much head regardless of what you do.

To calculate the GPM needed, look at some of the on-line calculators that figure out GPM required for a waterfall.

"X" amount of inches wide by "X" amount of inches deep for the stream. Once you have those numbers then you can plug those into the calculators to get the GPM needed to achieve that stream size. Multiple pools or not, the amount of water that you pump to the top of the hill is the amount of water that you get at the bottom of the hill once the pools are filled up.

Yes, but my thought is the pools would make the stream look bigger than it really is. Even though the total flow is small, the more pools it has, the bigger it will look.

To go along with this idea of appearances. How about at one (or more) of those pools, you pump water into those. Still try to pump into the top one, but then also pump into the lower ones. When the water flows into the last one, it will look like a lot and be impressive. Much like a natural spring on top of a mountain. The further it goes down, the more other water joins in as it gets lower. It should keep the pumping costs down a bit too.

Once again, another great idea from fish & chips!