Wait! Wait! I know this one: the answer is “No”. A hydraulic ram pump cannot be used as a perpetual motion machine.

You loose more water than you pump. There is the pay off.

Ok but what if you place the valve high enough to put the waste water back into the bucket?

What if you make the waste go to the bucket somehow so it will have all of its water

What if you make it so the waste water goes back into the water source.. how low can you make the water source with it still working?

What if you get the waste water pipe tall enough to go back into the top bucket the add a couple water turbines and start making free power. If this doesn’t make sense someone please tell me

Perpetual motion machines may not seem possible, but I'm sure you could make one if it was powered by a teenage boy's right arm

What if you made multiple of them in different areas but the next one catches the last ones water. Keep doing this until you have the last one higher than the first one then make the waste water from the last one goes down hill into the first one

The trickiest thing about making a perpetual motion machine is figuring out where to hide the battery.

I love how electrical components can all be reproduced in an hydraulic system, this is definitively a DC/DC boost converter (the inductance is water inertia).

Really interesting! This works in pretty much the EXACT same way as a boost converter in electronics (converts a lower voltage to a higher voltage, but with less current). Crazy how similar fluid dynamics and electronics are!

The bang you usually hear when turning your faucet off real fast is not the pipe expanding, but rather the pipe moving due to the weight of the moving water suddenly coming to a stop, and banging the pipe against something else. This is especially common when there's a long straight run of pipe, like along the basement ceiling, or up the wall to an upper floor that's not well anchored/secured.

HI from NZ. I sudscribed in about 10 seconds. You explain things clearly and concisely. That was a great demonstration. My family used to live in an old house that was badly damaged in the Christchurch 2011 earthquakes. We had an old Ram pump in the front garden that pumped water to 2 x holding tanks about 4 metres off the ground. The pumping ratio was 2/3 wasted to pump 1/3 to the tanks. The waste water was piped off to a nearby river. This house used to have 7 Ram pumps and provided water for the whole street. Another man who lived close by also had an old well. He plumbed his water out to the front of his property and provided emergency water for approximately 60000 people that lived in the area after the 2011 earthquakes hit. His flow rate was 30 litres per Minute. He got the water tested. It was 15 x more pure than shop bought water!

Cool ram pump setup James!

About a year or 2 ago, I watched this on a Survival TV show and I was confused.

This is how a lot of off grid homesteads get their water to their gardens or to their wells, I fell in love with the simplicity of the Ram pump, eventually I’m going to build one at home when I find an actual use for one

I've learned about that in my undergrad, as it is widely used in family farms here in Brazil to pump water uphill, the source is a flowing river, and it does really great.

I learned about ram pumps at Ha-Ha Tonka State Park in Missouri. The old tower was up several hundred feet from the spring below. This method was used to supply water to the houses at the top of the cliff. Thanks for the easy explanation!

7:10

If you put a tank (with an air hole in the top of it) on the waste valve it eventually collects enough water to increase the pressure backwards & puts a small amount of water back into the system that again increases pressure.