pto-driven sludge pump?

[andrewy]

Hello - I wanted to check with you all to see if any of you had experience with purchasing/using a pto-driven sludge pump for the purpose of cleaning out a pond that is silting up. Here's a pic -

In our location, digging out the pond with a backhoe is not feasible. We started looking at dredges, and found a good option there - http://www.piranhapump.com/mini_dredges.html

The thing is we'd like to find an option that isn't going to run us 9 grand. Using our 40hp New Holland tractor's pto would seem like a good way to go.

Any advice or words of wisdom would be very much appreciated.

-Angela and Andrew

 

[Soundguy]

Are you looking for something like a 3" trash pump or semi trash pump?

Is the pond truly 'sludge' / slurry consistency.. or is it water with small occasional small debri?

We de-water ponds with 3" trash pumps al the time... units with small integral gas engines.. etc.

Soundguy

 

[charlz]

From what I have seen pto pumps are way more expensive than engine drive pumps.

I watched the video of the dredge.... looks like it would be a lot of work.

You might be able to rent pumps and hoses. Maybe buy some cheap chinese throw away pumps. I don't see anything special accept for the head they use on the hose.

What are you going to do with the spoils? Could be a lot of (smelly) material.

 

[andrewy]

sounds like you're both saying that getting a cheap stand-alone trash pump would be better than getting the pto driven option. right?

spoils will go into a collection/composting area that we will build. the stuff is likely to be anaerobic and stinky at first, but we're figuring it would be a pretty good compost or soil amendment once the water is out of it. It's rich mountain soil basically, washed into the pond by the creek that feeds it.

our plan is to work at this a day or two each week - the whole job would take months to complete, but the costs would be lower and the disturbance to the pond and the surrounding land would be less. and it would give each new batch of goo time to drain off.

 

[andrewy]

Sound guy - our goal wouldn't be to dewater the pond completely. It has a pretty good inflow that would quickly make up for what we'd be taking out of it. What does a 3" semi-trash pump cost you, and what should we look for/avoid?

Thanks!

 

[darkviper]

most of the farmers around here just rent a track hoe for a couple of hours and bust the dam wide enough for a dozer blad to work the **** backup when finished. Let the pond drain and dry up in a couple of weeks then rent about a cat d4 d5 dozer and dredge out the pond. The fix the **** and whala. for the average size pond cost you between $1000-$3000 depending on the size and amount of sediment. Then you can move all the sediment below the pond dam so that it will not wash back in

 

[andrewy]

We've gotten quotes on the trackhoe idea from three different people and everyone we've talked to is saying 10K and up. One guy said it can't be done with a trackhoe at all. Busting a dam that's held for over 60 years sounds like a bad idea to me - is that a standard practice? Diverting it and drying it out would be easy enough, but getting that heavy machinery down our road and riding all over our soft bottom land with not a lot of maneuvering room...it just doesn't sound like something we want to do. That's why we started looking at the pump idea.

 

[charlz]

Well, how big is it, how deep is it? That pond looks pretty big in the pic, is that a road/driveway on the other side?

I think versus paying 9k for that dredge you could come up with similar materials much cheaper. Particularly with the cheap pumps.

Using the dredge idea keep in mind that you are going to need to move the nozzle over every inch of the bottom, probably multiple times. Seems like a huge project to me based on how big the pond appears.

Drain/dry/dig seems like the easiest way. Dunno how long it would need to dry before you could put equipment on it to dig it out.

 

[andrewy]

It's about an 1/8 of an acre. 2' deep now, but we had reports it was once 8' or so. The driveway is behind it, yeah, but between the road and the pond is the old creekbed that was diverted to make the pond. The old creek wraps around more than half of the pond, and most of the other side abuts the mountainside. Makes it hard to access with machinery.

 

[Soundguy]

Check northern tools website and harbor freight website for trash pump prices / shippin to your area...

Soundguy

 

[charlz]

hmm 1/8 acre of mud 6 feet deep is what? 1200 yards of mud? of course it isn't likely 6 feet deep over the whole area but still.... that is a lot of mud!

Any idea of what kind of solids you might run into? gravel etc.? your big pump would need to be able to handle those size solids.

I wonder if you couldn't build some kind of float like they have in the dredge video, mount your pumps with a solid down tube a few feet into the mud and then sllllooooowwwllllly drag it down the center of the pond with your tractor/rope/cables/winch/whatever and trench out the center. Add length to the down tube and do it again. Eventually some of the mud towards the sides would migrate to the middle and you just keep working out the middle every now and then. Be a lot less work then trying to move all that hose all over the place by hand.

Need a good plan for all that mud though.

 

[John_Mc]

A thought for once you finish dredging out your pond:

I've seen some ponds where people anticipated the problem of sediment washing in. They dug a small settling pond just before the inlet end. The source water went into that first, the sediment settled out there, and the water ran off the top of this into their main pond. They designed the shape of the sediment pond to allow digging it out with a backhoe or excavator from the shore. An alternative would be to design in a bypass method for the sediment pond, so you could run the source water around it, drain the sediment pond and dig it our with a tractor.

The basic idea is to let the mini sediment pond catch the crud before it gets to your main pond, then clean the sediment pond from time to time.

John Mc

 

[acohen100]

I have your exact same problem.I have a 1.5 acre pond that is badly filled in. I was quoted upwards of $75K for a full drain, rerout and dredge. I finally decided to try biological methods - Lake Aeration and Pond Aeration Systems to Improve Water Quality - Clean-Flo.com

The entire solution cost $5K for me and will not require dredging or pumping. You may want to look into that. I haven't been able to set it up yet.

 

[mjw]

While I think aeration is a great thing, it will only work for organic 'sludge', like tree leaf debris. If what you have is actual soil then it won't do much good as the soil won't break down. Same thing for all the bacteria solutions you may run into. Also if you happen to have organic sludge there are reports of tilapia (a fish) doing a good job of cleaning up the bottom (some lake in mexico is regaining depth after the introduction of tilapia).

For more info try Pond Boss Magazine Home Page!.
The forums there are a great source of information. I think that is where I found tractorbynet.

I'm not sure I would want to bust the dam either, and it sounds like your fed from a creek so the bottom wouldn't dry out without diverting the inflow.

If you do try the dredging let us know how it goes, sounds like an ambitious project.

Hope to see you on Pond Boss.

Matt Wehland

 

[andrewy]

We're still looking at this concept, but been delayed mainly due to lack of time. My son does the FIRST Robotics league at school, and I recently went to the regional competition. A few days of watching robots moving semi-autonomously around the field filled my head up with plenty ideas of making some sort of gizmo that would crawl around the pond floor, and suck up the silt. One though I had was some sort of Archimedes screw type power head, sort of like a push reel mower, with the pump inlet at the rear center of the housing. The screw would agitate the pond bottom and move the silt towards the suction head. Might work, might not.

We've done some research into how to deal with all the silt and sludge that we pull up, and have come across geotextile dewatering bags. Basically, they are bags made of water permeable / silt impervious fabric with an inlet through which you direct the outlet of your pump. The bag fills up, and the water drains out, leaving the sediment behind. Once you are done, you're left with a huge bag filled with dirt, that you could either leave in place as a little hill, or you could slit it open and remove the dirt with a FEL. They are not exactly cheap maybe a few grand for a bag with the appropriate dimensions.

Andrewy

 

[herringchoker]

About 20 years ago I was involved with a project to remove about 13,000 cu. yd. of sludge from a settling pond at an acid drainage treatment plant. The pond was about 200' x 200' and 10' deep. The contractor who was low bidder was a sharp cookie who could think "outside the box". Basically, he did what charlz suggested and it worked very well.

He built a small barge and rigged up cables so he could haul it back and forth in a grid pattern and so cover the entire pond. On the barge he had a 6" sludge pump with an intake he could raise and lower as required. In this case he only used the barge pump to liquefy the sludge so it would flow towards a larger pump he had mounted on the shore, where it was loaded by gravity from a storage tank into tanker trucks. In your case you could probably start working from the side and discharge on shore and then work out to the middle and (if necessary) liquefy it and direct it toward the shore where you could pump it again over the side.

Of course, this all depends on the consistency of your sludge. Ours was pretty wet at the top but got denser with depth and was quite solid on the bottom. Once it was stirred up by the barge mounted pump, it readily flowed toward the big pump on shore until, near the end, there was no slope on the bottom. Then the barge pumped it to the big pump.

Something else for you to think about. Good luck with it.

 

[chh]

Some of the posts talked about using a trash pump. Those work well for dewatering but you are going to need a true sludge pump. There is nothing cheap or small about a true sludge pump. We had a hog lagoon cleaned out last year and I will tell you that sludge requires quite a bit of agitation and a really heavy duty pump to move it. This was all organic solids, but it still took a trackhoe, dozer and a couple of dumptrucks to get the last of it out. The company that cleaned my lagoon cleans out city waste lagoons, farm lagoons and waste ponds off of water treatment plants. My lagoon was 200'x200'x8'. The pump/agitator required 140 hp tractor just to run it and it could pump 4" to 5" solids.


Most ranchers around here have this done by a trackhoe with an extra long boom. The dam does not need to be breached and most usually the pond does not even need to be drained if the water isn't too deep. If you could divert the creek water and this really should just be a 1 day job for a pond this size and no bigger than the pond is he should be able to do a lot of it from the driveway. If you have any farms in your area you might check with your local NRCS office and see what kind of Ag contractors are in your area that do this type if work. Currently a trackhoe of this type can be hired locally for under $200 an hour and if you want a dump truck to move the debris that would be extra.

 

[chh]

Here is a pic of the crew I used in action. Total depth of solids/sludge was 4' over the area when they started with about 3' of water. They are nearly done in this pic.

I have also done full pond cleanouts myself with a dozer. Dewater with a pump, allow the bottom to dry 2 to 3 weeks in July or August, and push everything out. I have seen people to small ponds with a FEL and a boxblade.

 

[Squeak n Itch]

I have seen the big brother of these types of pumps in action here in Lexington in the harbor. They used hundreds of feet to get the sand out to Lake Huron. Worked effectively but it does take time. With the timeframe you describe moving the unit may not be so critical as the sediment would fill in the hole made the previous week.

Perhaps you should check into a PTO driven irrigation pump. Not sure they will handle the larger solids but they are pretty hefty pieces of equipment.

My neighbor next door would love to have a solution to the same problem you describe.

 

[chh]

My irrigation pump will not pump much in the way of solids. Using an agitator I could move small amounts but those pumps are not designed for that and will clog. The lagoon in the above pics was expected to have 6' of solids in it at the age it was when we closed. Using the agitator with the irrigation pump reduced the solids level to where there was only 4' over the 12 year span that we used it.