A lady over at the Aquaponics Community asked about how it might be possible to pump the water for an aquaponics system in a rural setting - India, I believe.
That got me thinking - seems to me that adding a water tower (of sorts) in addition to the sump and constant-height fish tank is part of the answer. But how to get the water up into the water tower?
Windmills are an obvious answer - kind of. But Im always about figuring out something elegant from commodity bits. So wildeyeUKs video of his water wheel got me thinking.
What if I drove the wheel with wind energy, rather than a stream? And what if I was drawing water from the fish tank with multiple scoops, so the drag from any individual scoop was low? [Found quite a treatise here at lurkertech.com.]
Heres another "Perpetual Motion" water wheel that fires the imagination. Bicycle wheels are commodity items that are highly tuned for minimal drag.
Heres a completely different concept:
And heres a new hand pump that could run off wind, once primed (this is the first video of four - watch all four videos if you have time):
But this is the funnest video - Ben (aged 6 years) making a piston pump. Purpose? To have fun.
