Sunday, June 8, 2014

Hose reel, part 2

Not where I wanted the water to come out
Here's a situation where the mobile welder would come in handy.  If you look in the picture above, you'll see the tripod that is part of the hose reel. you grab this and unwind the hose; the water cannon is on top of it.    The problem is that the water isn't coming out of it.   you can see a small stream of water coming out of the line, but none out of the cannon, and certainly not at any kind of pressure, which is odd.  

I'm thinking that there's a blockage in the line somewhere.  So now I'm trying to figure out how to clear something out of the 1000' of hose, but first I might as well fix the pipe.  At first I thought it was the gasket between two pipes, but nope, it's the pipe itself, rusted through.  

It turns out that the hose reel has enough length that I can just detach the hose, and drag it all the way back to the welder in the shop.  Weld it up, and then drag it all the way back.   Takes about an hour, and I'm back where I started.  

I didn't get the welding done until dark.  In the morning I'll pull the remaining hose off the reel and shake it a bit and see if I can't break loose whatever is inside of it, apply some pressure and hope for the best.  

click on the picture for a bigger version

Here's a picture of the full irrigation setup.  The tractor powering the pump is at the left, in the distance.  It's about 2000' from the tripod.  The hose reel is in the center, and is orange.   What I'd like to do is water the squash patch before the seeds germinate; both to fertilize them and to get rid of the water in the manure lagoon.  Kinda kill two birds with one stone.  But this blockage mystery is making that hard.

3 comments:

Jeff said...

When I've seen folks emptying their lagoon around here they use an implement that is pulled behind a tractor with a bunch of jets. I'd imagine that nozzle might get clogged easily with the amount of solids in your lagoon water.

Bruce said...

Hi,

I'm a small time fabricator with no need for a mobile welder, but always wondered how the Zena welders performed.

They've got enough power to do farm repairs and are relatively cheap.

http://www.zena.net/htdocs/welders/weldinf.shtml#Top

I don't have any financial interest in the company. I appreciate all the reporting/results you put on your blog. When I think I have a link/idea that's worth passing on, the least I can do is make a comment.

:)

R. Stenoski said...

You may need a secondary pump. 2000' is a long way to push clean water. With the solids in a lagoon just the friction loss over that distance has to be an issue. If you are using old fire hose it is also possible that the lining has separated from the casing which will pretty much kill any flow no matter how much pressure you have.