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Sorry if this is a repeat from a previous post...
I am curious as to how the windmills worked back in the days before electricity.. Does the windmill turn some sort on impeller to pump water to the top of the well? What keeps the water at the top? Does it flow in to a barrel then just overflow back down the well?? any info would be appreciated thanks
I suppose there were some different arrangements, but I'll tell you a little bit about ours in the early '50s just outside Healdton, OK, which I think was pretty representative. When Dad bought the place, there was an old rusty tank sitting on the ground by the windmill, which we promptly replaced with a new one (I think it was about a 500 gallon tank) which we put up on a wooden framework to get the bottom of the tank perhaps 6' above the ground. Gravity fed the water through a pipe to the house. When Dad bought the place, there was cold water only and only to a kitchen sink. Getting the tank up in the air provided enough water pressure for Dad to partition off one bedroom and build a bathroom and install a water heater.
The wheel (blades, fan, or whatever you want to call the part the wind turns) was probably a 6' wheel and was connected to a gear box, so as the blades turned the gear box propelled the sucker rod out of the bottom of the gear box up and down. Of course, the tail was there to keep the wheel facing into the wind. When the tank was full, and we saw it running over, we turned off the windmill by pulling down on a lever that had a cable going to the brake and it also turned the tail parallel with the wheel.
So the pump was actually a sucker rod going down into the well (I think ours was only about 125' deep), and there was obviously a check valve down in there. The only trouble we ever had (and how I hated it on cold windy days) was that the entire head turning to always face the wind would occasionally unscrew a section of the sucker rod somewhere way down in the well. So Dad or I would have to climb up there, remove a pin to disconnect the sucker rod at the gear box, then lift if up and down and feel around until we got it lined up and screwed back together, then lift it high enough to reconnect the sucker rod to the output shaft of the gearbox.
It was very good water and plenty of it. We had one outdoor hydrant right at the windmill and I could just leave the water running out to the garden, sometimes overnight, but never ran the well out of water. Unfortunately, we DID have a few times when there was simply not enough breeze to turn the windmill, our tank ran dry, and we had to haul water from town in 10 gallon milk cans, until the wind picked up again.
There is no electricity in a wind mill at all.
OLD DAYS heck we still have two of em.
It is just like a hand pump. The actual pump is down in the well. Some wind mills are even designed so that there is a pump handle down at the bottom so that you can pump water by hand if the wind does not blow. The actual wind mill just pumps the handle up and down just like you would do.
Usually there is a tank up on stilts 15 or 20 feet high. The mill pumps into the tank and the water gravity feeds out of the tank to provide a little pressure. If it gets full it just overflows or you turn the mill off.
Look here.
http://www.aermotorwindmill.com/
And who was it that said his family used to have two of them, but had to get rid of one because there wasn't enough wind to turn both of them?
Hmm Don't think I ever said we did not have enough wind we got lots. In fact here is one of ours after the wind kinda blew on it.
http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/b...d/windmill.jpg
Fortunately, we never had a problem like that. Our water tank was smaller in diameter, but taller than that one, and the bottom of the tank wasn't that high off the ground. In fact, it may have only been about half that high.
[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] We had an Aermotor Windmill and I do believe it was made in Broken Arrow Oklahoma. The pump was down in the well and had a plunger with leathers on it and as the rod went up and down it pulled the water through the bottom valve of the pump barrel and then on up the pipe with each successive stroke of the rod. The fan diameter was eight feet. We never had one unscrew. We only had the windmill as a back-up since a jet pump had been installed by the late forties. Out tank was redwood staves with wroght iron bands, was about twenty feet high. Widmills are still widely uised for cattle water out on the prairie since they require no electricity and people won't usually steal the equipment like they would a generator or an electric pump. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]