As in post #4, the equipment is called a “cold trap”. You can Google that term and see many for sale for applications very different than this one.
The actual physical limitation in your scenario would be heat flow into the surface region of the water. That surface will cool quickly, as every molecule of water you pull away costs you one chunk of vaporization heat. That heat has to come from somewhere: convection is your best bet, limited by practical choices on the ground.
If you pump too fast, you’ll freeze the surface. So, you’d need to throttle the pump to draw just below the rate where it would overshoot the input heat. This rate will vary with the environmental conditions.
If you use a fat pipe and if (mostly) convection can get tens of watts of heat flowing continuously to the surface, and you don’t accidentally freeze the surface, you could maybe get a gallon of water every three days when the lake is warm.
And the next two posts, by @ricepad and @Pasta pretty much answered the hypothetical.
Which, i suppose, is why the thread turned to “how to get water to the house” instead of the hypothetical question.
So, turning to that:
Although, if there’s an easement to run a line at all, it’s a really badly written easement that doesn’t let you put a pump at the bottom, where it belongs.
If the actual question was about the suction height limit, I really wish that @eschereal had just asked that rather than framing the ridiculous scenario.
You could use a jet pump with an ejector at the bottom of two pipes. In this system your pump, which is at your house, forces water down one pipe, where it goes through the ejector at high speed and picks up additional water, then returns up the other pipe. The ejector is tiny, like the size of the screen you’d have down there anyway. If you only have permission for one pipe, you would run the other pipe inside it, so a pipe within a pipe. See “Shallow well pumps” here:
When one is evacuating A/C systems, the vacuum pump gets saturated with water vapor. This is exactly what would happen in your scenario. Of course, you would have to worry about the water in the pipe freezing, which is also what happens during A/C pump down.
The practical short answer to your question is no. It would be easier to use a dehumidifier unit on the ambient air if you want to go this route.
As you state, a pump at the surface cannot suck water up more than 32 feet. That’s because a pump at the surface draws a vacuum, and the ambient air pressure pushes the water up the pipe. At one atmosphere of pressure (14.7 psia), that corresponds to a theoretical maximum of 33.96 feet. Because you won’t be able to draw a complete vacuum and due to friction losses, the practical limit is somewhere between 20-25 feet.
So the answer is to put the pump at the bottom. By the stated description of the problem, if you can put a pipe down to the lake, you can put a small submersible pump down inside the pipe as well. (Yes, I get that you have posed a hypothetical situation that does not allow this, but this really doesn’t make any sense.)
But whether you can do this or not, you don’t want to. Lake water without treatment is not suitable as potable water. (Due to animals, fish, runoff, etc.) It is far better to drill a well instead and intercept the naturally filtered groundwater.
And what is a drilled well? A vertical pipe with a submersible pump at the bottom.
You can push water up more than 30 feet, but you can’t pull it up that far, because you are really just creating a vacuum, and air pressure pushes it up.
In the scenario the OP posed, you have a pipe going downhill to a water body with a pump at the top of the pipe. The pump draws a vacuum and the surrounding air pressure pushes the fluid up the pipe.
This is exactly how a drinking straw works. If Superman had a 35 foot straw and tried to suck water up, he would be limited to ~30 feet.
Or if you drilled a well and put at pump at the top, you would have the same limitation. The limit is on how high a pump can suck water.
But if you put the pump at the bottom, there is no limitation. But the pump is no longer sucking the fluid up the pipe. Instead, with the pump at the bottom (like a submersible pump), the pump pushes the water up. This can be done for hundreds of feet up the pipe, or into the air like the fountain in Switzerland.
I think this is the only way. But does that count as pumping? The screw needs a straight shot from point A to point B. The bucket brigade is a bit more flexible.
Is there any limit to the diameter of the pipe? Could you put pipes and pumps inside a bigger pipe so you can suck up water from the inlet in the pond, then push the water up the rest of the way with another pump?
An Archimedes screw would work, and it also counts as pumping. Note that you have to maintain the seal between the screw and the pipe casing or it won’t work. And if the seal is too tight, you can’t physically turn the screw.
But there are much better methods than this, such as a small-diameter submersible pump.
You don’t need multiple pumps. A single submersible pump within the pipe that sits beneath the surface of the water will work.
Or if you don’t want the pump to be submerged, place a self-priming pump less than 30 feet above the surface of the water so it can lift the water that distance, and then have it push the water up the remaining distance. (The closer to the surface and less it has to lift, the better it will work. But if the pump is submerged below the surface, it will work even better.)
This is exactly how a well pump works. I have one in the front yard of my house. My residential well consists of 6-inch diameter perforated steel pipe that is drilled down about 400 feet into the bedrock, with a small submersible pump inside that is placed about 300 feet down or so. The pump sits below the groundwater level, sucks water in, and then pushes water up the well (via a 1-1/4” discharge PVC discharge pipe that runs up the well). The suction and discharge all happen within the body of the pump. (It’s a centrifugal pump.)
Which is pretty impressive. The discharge pressure of the pump and exerted on the pipe at the bottom is a minimum of 833 psig just to overcome the water head (i.e. the pressure of the water at the bottom). To actually get the water to flow requires even more discharge pressure.
Typical water main fittings are only rated for 250 psig or 350 psig. This must be very robust equipment to withstand that kind of water pressure.
P.S. I didn’t mean to imply that lift pumps are limited to pumping water only “hundreds of feet” up. The actual limitation is mainly an engineering and/or materials constraint, not a physical one.
So, that we’ve covered the practical answers, can we start in on the impractical ones?
The fundamental problem is the ambient pressure is too low. To fix that, we cover the pond with a strong material and pressurize it. Kind of like the Metrodome. With enough pressure, we can pump the water from the top of the pipe.
In the context though - water delivered to your home is not a right. If I build a house in an isolated area I would be on thin ice, if only there was water for ice to form, demanding water service as a right.
