Watering my pond levee, crude but effective

Bdavis · May 27, 2012

We had a bad drought last year and I did not water the top and sides of my levee. So during the wet winter I really had some bad places develop. I used my FEL and spent about 1/2 day dumping dirt and smoothing out the rough spots.

I purchased a 1600 gallon sump pump from harbor freight 37.00 and the rest of the equipment I already had. ( xpower supply - 1500 watt inverter, scrap wood , wire, and a broken shovel handle). It does not look like much but it
was easy to handle and worked great.

I was really pleased with the output. I did a test before I even used it with a five gallon bucket and it was almost the equal to my well pump. Not sure what the run time is with my Xpower because I got tired of watering after about 30 minutes and put it on recharge.

creekbend · May 27, 2012

It appears that your method is a success. :thumbsup:

Bdavis · May 28, 2012

creekbend said:
It appears that your method is a success. :thumbsup:

So far, I am planning on putting a sprinkler on the end of the hose next time so I can do other things while applying the water. Also a sprinkler should allow for a little bit better distribution and not create much run off when trying to apply water to the slope of the levee. If I can get a summer out of this setup , I will be very happy.
Thanks

boggen · May 28, 2012

cool! never seen or thought about using a piece of lumber as a "skid" to attach sump pump on. and then using a pole to push skid with pump on it, out into the water.

with size of pump you have, you might try coming off the pump outlet a couple feet (what ever size the outlet is) with same size pipe with a WYE, and then reduce down to 2 garden hoses.

that garden hose, can cause a good amount of friction loss. by adding a second garden hose with wye right on pump, 2 sprinklers will not have as much water, compared to just pumping water to one sprinkler. but with 2 sprinklers you should get much larger area coverage.

Bdavis · May 28, 2012

boggen said:
cool! never seen or thought about using a piece of lumber as a "skid" to attach sump pump on. and then using a pole to push skid with pump on it, out into the water.

with size of pump you have, you might try coming off the pump outlet a couple feet (what ever size the outlet is) with same size pipe with a WYE, and then reduce down to 2 garden hoses.

that garden hose, can cause a good amount of friction loss. by adding a second garden hose with wye right on pump, 2 sprinklers will not have as much water, compared to just pumping water to one sprinkler. but with 2 sprinklers you should get much larger area coverage.

I do need to change the outlet. The one problem I did find was that coming straight up with garden hose and then bending the hose to follow pole for
support ( a cheap garden hose) does cause the hose to collapse
after it has set out in the sun all day.

I plan to go up with hard pipe from the outlet about 6 inches and hard pipe a elbow and then put a good quality hose on it and that should take care of the little collapse I had.

I had about 10 different designs in my head and was pretty lucky when the
first one I tried worked well. You can't tell from the photo but the pump is sitting on a 4 X 4 block to get it off the bottom of the pond a little higher. The 4X4 block is screwed to the skip plate.