Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I like it! I still think the main obstacle will be slowing the weight enough to last a day. Same thing with the springs storing the PE. Perhaps some sort of ratcheting on the pulley mechanism?

Hey Delgrade:
This is the spiral tubing water pump, found out about this from the barrelponics forum:
http://lurkertech.com/chris/eco/pump/morgan/tripod/

I am thinking more about items that you could find out in the bush, so to speak. If I had hydraulic valves or solar panels, etc. then I could surely somehow rig up electricity.

I am thinking more like a desert island (like Aus?)/developing world scenario. Dig out a hole for a pond, pile up the dirt into a crater to make an elevated grow bed, cut the bike up with a hacksaw for pipes, use the inner tube for some tubing, use painted canvas or plastic for a pond liner, ideally no petrochemicals, only "found" items...

DDM, could the bladder(s) be made from car tires?

The hydraulic thing is good for gearing up the high pressure to movement, it would be very hard to gear up a couple-inches per hour spring movement for exampe to many rotations of a wheel or other.

Another thing that would be nice would be a mechanical timer, to run the water for a while then shut it off for a while, so that there is enough energy to cover the whole day.

Instead of a water pump the bladder could be filled with air and drive an air lift?

DD, I don't see how the spiral pump would apply here. You'd need a flowing source of water to power the wheel.

You`d have that from the drains back to the tank.
In itself it would`t be enough to run the system so you`d still need an electrical pump or equivilent.
You could recycle the energy from a couple of feet of drop to turn a spiral pump and increase the overall system efficiency a few percent.

The falling weight would spin the wheel.

Ooooh, transmission cable on the axle. I get it. Very nice, simple. Easy to crank back up to since you already have the wheel and axle. You can also vary the speed of a given weight by changing the angular momentum with the size of the wheel.

Actually the speed could be controlled by a simple govoronor in oil or water or even air. The faster it turns, the wings would stretch out causing more resistance . If you put the govoronor in the water where the fish are, that would be an excellent way of aerating while controlling speed.

Fun reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escapement

Here is one of those spiral pumps in action.

Here is a water pump that looks like it could move a lot of water easy. This must be a version of the hand pump I was talking about! You could solar power this and move barrels of water!

Nice construction, it would make a great garden toy.

Start with a very full header tank for a good supply of potential energy that the pump didn`t provide
Add a few well placed cuts in the video.. et voila! perpetual motion

Here's a pendulum pump, you could use a vertical weight and a clock mechanism to power it, though I'm sure there is something a lot easier out there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNpgl7o_1QI

Don't the Amish use windmills?
Big enough header tank and other emergency pumping methods would require little effort.

Gee I really love these dreamers and thinkers as I consider myself as one

but as long as you don't know the water output @ a certain head @ the energy input (whether mechanical, electric, manual or donkeycarrot's) you cannot jump to any conclusions.

Take the pump in example 1:

while this pump's output SEEMS impressive, and the level in the barrel SEEMS to go down quickly, I wonder how it would compare to a similar barrel without lid which I would empty with a bucket.
I think I would win the competition (except for emptying the bottom few inches).

Take the pump in example 2:

I think that swinging the pendulum back and forth takes as much if not more energy than directly swinging the pump handle would take.

take the pump in example 3:

there is something fishy in this Utube video:
At this slow speed, a spiral pump on it's exit acts on the principle of communicating vats (same goes for the Archimedes pump).
So it can never lift the water up above the level of it's highest point. Impossible.
This is why the pump in example 4
has such a big radius and is mounted high above the water with only the bottom dipped into the pond.
Between each gulp of water a gulp of air is entrapped by the rotation which pulses the water up to maximum the highest point of the pump diameter.
If attempted to lift above this highest point, the water will simply push back the air and flow back into the pond from which it is coming.

Unless the spiral pump is driven to higher speeds to overcome this back flow (the speed through the water must be higher than the speed with which the water tends to naturally flow back out of the tube) it cannot possibly work.

We are often fooled by perception and by our own wishful thinking.

It is like in matrimony: confidence is good, control is better

Frank