Just need to vent...

Is your municipal water supply flow rate that high? You are saying your water flow rate is 40-50gpm. I have never lived in a house that exceeded 10gpm of water flow in a city or country. I think our current deep well pump is rated 5gpm, but at the faucet, I get only ~3gpm. If my faucet provides that amount of flow rate, I would never need to use a power washer. On the other hand, I would be afraid to take a shower with the faucet fully open. It would hurt me. LOL

 

I used an engineering toolbox app to calculate maximum flow thru a 1' line at 60 psi.

To be honest, I have no idea what my actual flow rate is and if it drops during a power outage.

 

Here are pictures of my set up if you guys are interested in what one of these water driven systems look like. I did it myself and it was an all day project drilling through the sill and concrete/brick and sump pit lid.

(The suspenders hanging from the pipe are from my chest waders stored for my next fly fishing adventure

 

...and with the requisite snarky humor out of the way, I'll thank you for sharing the pictures. It's a tidier arrangement than I had expected from seeing the device by itself.

And it does look dry down there...

 

Had that on the Amazon wishlist. Clever, but the attachments start adding up. Getting excited about a wheelbarrow is one of those 'you got old' things.

I ended up with a Magliner handtruck with a stair climber kit. They've been around for awhile. The aluminum ones you might have seen used by movers are at businesses were likely Magliners.

 

My wife got us one of those right when we bought the house, still in service. I was skeptical at first but it's one of our favorite tools. Yes we have an attachment library now with an annoying amount of money tied up in it. All I can say is don't do them all at once, look for sales.

At first glance it seems tiny and puny. But after years of working with it, you realize it is calibrated very precisely for what middle-aged bodies should be pushing around their gardens.

 

I checked the Mgliner site. The lowest price on the two-wheel hand track is $216 Hand Truck 111-AA-815. Sure they all look sturdy and professionally built. But, they all look only work on a flat surface of a warehouse or garage floor and are not suitable for traversing across dirt, lawn, and uneven wooded landscape. Our shed is located in the backyard. To get anything from it to the house, I would have to traverse ~50 yards of untamed ground (not really a path) that is often very wet and muddy.

Something like this is what I really need... but that's expensive.
http://www.amazon.com/Snap-Loc-Cargo-Control-SLV0750HC4Y-All-Terrain/dp/B00NOBZJHQ

It would have been a perfect tool to carry the bee hives. When they get full of honey, they can easily weigh over 100 lbs. But, I closed my apiary last year after I got repeated bear attacks that basically destroyed most of the hive boxes.

 

The worx cart would've been okay too. In dolly mode with a ratchet strap added for safety it works pretty darn well. I've moved appliances, bookcases and uh, giant window air conditioners with it. The depth of the load bowl means it's a little tighter in a stairwell, might not fit as wide of a bookcase as with a purpose-made stair dolly... but as a part-duty compromise it's great.

 

Flow rate and pressure are related but not the same. The pressure of your water supply is maybe around 60 to 80 psi. The pressure out of a power washer is way higher, and that's why it's so good at washing things.

If a water supply is able to source 40 to 50 GPM, that doesn't mean you're going to see 40 to 50 GPM out of a 2.5 GPM showerhead designed for that pressure. You'll see 2.5.

If you unscrew the showerhead off the bare pipe end, you'll see more.

The maximum flow available from the water supply is what you would see if you left the pipe wide open, no resistance, very close to where it enters the house. The pressure as the water glugs out will then be very low, but the volume flow will be high.

You can estimate what that flow rate would be by measuring what the pressure drops to at different known flow rates out of a faucet, and extrapolating to the flow rate that would drop all of the pressure.

 

Mine has the 10 inch pneumatic wheels. Couldn't find a measurement, but the eyeball says the wheels on the Aerocart are about the same size. I used it to move large logs across the yard recently. I got it off Amazon for about $50 less than their site. The stair climber kit did push it over $200. That isn't an option for the Aerocart, and they really help out.

 

Not that I am versed in fluid dynamics or Bernoulli's principle. I understand that if the flow rate is constant, then an increase in the speed of a fluid occurs simultaneously with a decrease in static pressure inside of the pipe. But my point was that if the flow rate in our home is 10 times higher, then I think the pressure inside the pipe would also increase proportionally. As I said, our house is provided by a nominal 5 gpm rated deep well pump. If that flow rate is increased to 50 gpm, provided our plumbing system does not fail, I would think the water pressure in the system would also increase proportionally, wouldn't it? BTW, I do not think our showerhead has a 2.5gpm flow restrictor required by current law. The flow rate is already low without an eco-showerhead. And we don't pay for water, though we do pay for heating it, so I should check if it is equipped with the restrictor.

 

Flow is proportional (not equal) to the square root of delta P

 

The Bernoulli business is addressing a different question: what pressures do you measure at different points in a (varying cross-section) pipe when a constant flow rate is passing through it?

The flow rate in your house isn't constant at all. When all the faucets are off (and nothing leaks), the flow rate is zero, right? And the pressure then is whatever pressure you see from the source at zero flow.

So the water source (pump, or city service hookup) doesn't give you a fixed flow rate all the time. It gives you up to a maximum flow rate.

As you start opening faucets, you see more than zero flow. To a point, as you open more faucets, you see more flow. (Though the flow at the ones you opened first will decrease a little, because the supply pressure is being dropped a bit by the increase in overall flow. There's more water coming out of six open faucets than out of one, but less coming out of that one than there was when it was the only one open.)

Eventually, if you have enough faucets to open, you'll have reached the point where there's roughly no increase in aggregate flow, you're just sharing the same supply maximum flow among more faucets.

If you have a bunch of pressure taps at different points in the piping system with different cross sections, you may also be able to measure those Bernoulli effects while the same volume flow passes through the different cross sections. But that's a nuance over and above the basic effect that when there's no flow, there's no flow, and the maximum flow is simply a limit you eventually reach.

(Of course, within the ejector dewatering device itself, that nuance is what makes all the magic happen.)

 

I understand that. But that is not the question I am asking. If the supply maximum flow to the plumbing system in the house is increased by 10 times, wouldn't it also increase the potential max water pressure by 10 times? It is easily conceivable that the greater the pressure, the higher the flow rate. So, is the converse also true? The greater the incoming flow rate to the house, the higher the water pressure inside the pipe?

 

Since 1992, a maximum of 2.5 GPM is the federally mandated flow rate for new shower heads.
When I moved into my city house my very first home improvement project was to drill out the flow restrictors in our shower heads.
We measured nearly 100 inches of rainfall last year in our rain gauge, although we're currently on track to get closer to my city's average 70 inches.
If some parts of the country cannot manage their ground water effectively, that's not a reason for me to have flow restrictors in my 'antique' shower head.
When I used to travel for Uncle, it was not unknown for me to pack a shower head and a pair of channel locks.
More than once I encountered 'pre-drilled' showers, mostly in efficiencies favored by construction workers.

Water restrictions make sense in some places but remember that over 70-percent of the the Earth's surface is covered by water which is quite deep in places!
If the surface were smoother and more spherical then water would cover the entire planet at a depth of over 1 mile.

Whiskey is for drinkin' and water is for fighting.....ONLY west of the big Muddy.....

 

Not at all. The water will be supplied at a certain familiar pressure (typically somewhere around 60 psi). A higher maximum flow capacity just means that pressure won't drop as steeply as you open more faucets and allow the flow to increase.

 

Yeah, building a water fountain show stage in the middle of a desert is simply wasteful... but restricting water flow on a showerhead in a place where the groundwater well is already naturally restricted does not seem to do anything.

OK, maybe in normal home plumbing in which the system water pressure is regulated to constant psi by a series of a pressure tank, expansion tank and valves, the flow rate may not change the pressure. But what if there are no checkpoints that regulate water pressure? Doesn't the higher flow rate of the water feeding the system increase the internal water pressure of the system?

 

Flow control valves can regulate that - provided folks want to pony up the cost.
.

 

I am not asking how to control the flow rate. I am just curious how the increased supply flow rate feeding the system affects the water pressure of the system. My intuition tells me without any regulator and controller, the 10x increase in the flow rate feeding the system will result in the 10x water pressure. Again, I am just asking this question on a theoretical system that has no tank, no valve, and no regulators to control the flow rate or pressure of the system.

 

Seems the flow rate goes up by the square root of the pressure increase; times 4 the pressure and get 2 times the flow. Which sounds like the increased air drag from higher vehicle speeds. Air and water are both fluids for purposes of the math, so there should be some relation.