So “not always” didn’t cover the situation in Utah?
It’s not usual, at least in Utah and a lot of Western states. I don’t know the specifics of other states so I only specified Utah, but it’s true for a lot of the country.
Maybe back east it’s usual, but not in much of the west.
That’s interesting about Utah water. IANAL, but the fee simple estate includes all rights to a property: surface, subterranean, and air. Theoretically a wedged slice which is a point at the center of the earth, and opening up to infinity in the sky. Different jurisdictions place practical limits on the fee simple estate, but I didn’t know Utah did so with water rights. Makes sense, though, considering how rare a resource water is in Utah.
In California, you own the rights to water within your property’s boundaries, unless those rights were severed under prior ownership. Again, I am not a lawyer, and I’m speaking in generalities. There are always exceptions.
I live in a rural area of Ohio. All the homes around here are on wells, and (AFAIK) water rights are not needed. But there’s a guy a few miles from me who has a home-business of filling swimming pools. Even though we have a lot of ground water here, I often wonder how he’s allowed to take all of that water for “free” and sell it. I’m not sure if there’s a state law that addresses the commercial use of ground water. I’m going to look into it.
It looks like there are some restrictions in some cases:
Groundwater use was largely unregulated by the state until the passage of the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). This law requires local agencies to address the undesirable impacts of overpumping and to bring their basins into balance by ending long-term overdraft.
It does look like it was a free-for-all before, but that seems to be changing.
That could well be. IMO, California needs to overhaul the entire issue of water rights, but it goes beyond that to the federal level, too. OTOH, I stopped caring on a professional level in 2015 when I retired, so I stopped paying much attention to the property rights game.
Did not expect to come across a Warren Miller reference in this thread. Good job!
Well, it’s getting to be about that time of year. Plus, Outside TV has been running a WM marathon for the last couple of weeks (at least) on YT.
Could you dig a well on your property 50 ft deep and then drill horizontal into the lake from the bottom of your well? Pumping it up should not be a big deal with the pump at the bottom.
It isn’t a question about a lake with restricted rights. It’s a question about the physics of suction. With a misleading dumb story about a lake mixed in to confuse people.
Just for your information, the swimming pool at the now sadly-gone Palisade Amusement Park in New Jersey was filled with salt water drawn from the Hudson River, Amazingly, the pool was emptied every evening and refilled every morning with water drawn from the Hudson, filtered, then sent up to the Park. The pool was 200 feet above the Hudson, and the pipe was 36" in diameter. Apparently there were no “break tanks”. The pump house was located on River Road along the Hudson, and used three 600 HP Westinghouse pumps to push the water uphill to the pool. The system was in use for years.
So it’s not outrageous or a major difficulty to place your pumps at the bottom and have them pumping huge amounts of water every day throughout the summer . The pool was opened in 1912 and used until the park closed in 1971.
You would think they could use the 200’ head to drive a generator to partially offset the power draw of the pumps during the exchange. Like an elevator counterweight.
Interesting proposal. At first, I was going to say that I cannot imagine that the easement for a water access pipe would be understood to be anything but a pipe and possibly other ancillary hardware on the surface. But pipes outdoors like this are primarily buried: not on the surface. So then, at what point does reasonable pipe excavations for routine burial installation become unnecessary drilling and beyond the easement?
Sure. By letting the water you just pumped up run back down another pipe to the bottom, but with that pipe containing a generator near the bottom.
Congrats: you’ve invented perpetual motion.
You have a 200 foot head versus down at the river, but roughly zero head versus the elevation where the pool is.
You could actually do this. And it’s not perpetual motion because of head losses in the pipe (i.e. frictional forces) and because generators are not perfectly efficient. But you certainly could recover some energy by emptying the pool at night down the same pipe and running the water through a turbine at the bottom.
The whole concept is similar to regenerative braking in electric cars.
Good point. I probably misunderstood @eschereal’s intent.
I was thinking they were thinking of diverting some of the upward flow at the top right back down at the time. To generate power to (help) run the pumps at that moment. Which of course amounts to perpetual motion if round-trip lossless (impossible) and pure waste if round-trip lossy (for certain).
But yeah, treating the pool as a miniature pumped storage system that’s filled from the river by pumps once per day then drained through generators back into the river once per day makes complete sense. As you say, there won’t be 100% recovery, but there will be some. If they have a way to use / store / sell the electricity they generate during the drain phase.
To complete the elevator analogy, simply don’t let the pool go dry. Use power gathered from the water going down to help offset the power needed to pump water up.
Pumped hydro storage is done at huge scale, this link has some drawings and that very cool photo at top.
AIUI, what matters is head. 10,000 gallons of water 200’ up produces the same force as 1 gallon of water 200’ up. The pool would start with 212’ of head and at the end would have 200’ of head, which is about 5% less. If you literally want to drain the pool and refill it, you would lose a little return as it empties, but, of course, you have to have a reservoir for the water you pump up so that you can refill the dry pool after you get that babyruth out.
Obviously you will not get all of the pumping power back from the draining, you will have to get some from the local utility, especially if the reservoir is higher than the pool, but at least you can get some back. Then, you also have to re-treat the pool waste before you can dump it back into the river.