I'm interested to know more about how water is treated before it makes its way back into the natural cycle. There must be such a wide range of pollutants that must be accounted for like biological elements and toxic chemicals. Some of which make there way into the system inadvertently from run-off, others through careless\deliberate disposal.
Hi Grady, I am an older man and have been wondering how those tanks work for decades. Your explanation was first rate, especially the part about the “stored energy” contained in the water within the tower. Thank you for such a well done explanation. If my daughter was little again, I would love to watch your videos with her.
I believe a similar concept can be applied to the electrical grid, where electricity is produced in excess at low demand periods, so that there's extra during high demand periods. With water towers, the water is literally stored at a high elevation storing gravity potential energy. Very fascinating...
Water towers also provide another mildly interesting service, by dint of their being tall and easy to spot: Navigational aids for low-flying aircraft. Pilots can use particular towns as waypoints and use the water towers to verify their location. In case you ever wondered why your local water tower probably has your town's name in huge letters painted on it.
Vyacheslav Kononenko, it still is useful for a lot if pilots. VFR flying is still popular among private and sports pilots as a recreational activity. Nowadays most VFR planes have some GNSS device onboard as a back up but not as a primary nav aid.
@@bumbarabun Pilots are still taught and use DED Reckoning. it is part of being a pilot. You have to know what to do when all that tech in your cockpit fails. and it will fail.it is a question of when, not if.
@Sean Lacey the fact that you did it does not mean it has any value. I doubt they would keep them in sake of navigation for people who want to keep old habits if need as water reservoir would not be there anymore.
Notice at 9:20 the bands on the wooden water tanks are closer together at the bottom, where the pressure is higher nearer the bottom. Wider spacing as they go up.
Very interesting video. For 12 years I was chief engineer in the pump house at the Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. The museum was built around the pump house which was opened in July 1877 to supply water to Auckland city. The boiler room contained four 30’ long Lancashire boilers which supplied steam to the double compound beam engine in the engine room next door. The engine drove two pumps which took water from Western Springs Lake to reservoirs in Ponsonby and in Kyber Pass Road, from where it was then gravity fed down to the city. As a result, I have always had a fascination with water and its supply and how without a water supply, you do not have a city. Keep up the good work.
Good video, I am an electrician and I work primarily in this industry. We also use hydro-pneumatic storage tanks to store water under pressure with an air blanket to absorb water hammer and help regulate the pressure as it builds up via a pump and is lost through demand. Anyway, I watch your videos a lot and they are consistently good, thanks for that!
Here in Brazil, depending on the region, almost every home has some kind of water storage. Specially in remote areas that have little to no infrastructure like the north and northeast of the country, the Amazon included. We're taught to design homes with storage for at least 2 days due to the systems being unreliable. Larger structures are also required to allocate a significant percentage of their daily water usage to be used exclusively for firefighting as there aren't any expressive quantities of hydrants in the country.
Less so in modern houses, but lots do in the UK too. Many houses have a water tank in the loft (attic) that serves bathroom taps (sinks, showers, baths, toilet) and then the kitchen tap is linked to the mains water supply. Growing up in an older house meant if you drank water from the bathroom tap it was a bit stale and tainted, but fresh as a daisy in the kitchen!
I used to be a water plant operator in my home town years ago. Nice to see a video explaining the use and importance of a water tower. Ours held 100,000 gallons of treated water when at capacity. Very handy thing to have when there were power outages or serious water pipeline breaks
I work on pumps every day. Supplying the irrigation needs for the many golf courses in my area is a huge industry by itself. They need pressurized water to run all of their different sprinkler systems. Lawn grass is the largest cash crop in America after all.
@I Am Sekou: lawn grass maintenance accounts for a majority of water use despite not producing anything of value (unless you count aesthetics). they tend to be invasive/non-native European species which do not survive well in the native climate and require vast quantities of additional water and frequent soil remediation.
I went to Palm Springs in the summer.... as a European, seeing the vast swathes of green land in the middle of a dessert was a crazy sight. I can't see how this is sustainable long term? But I don't know anything about how this water is sourced.
@@StealthElectronVIP The service company that supplies the golf courses, well anything really, with water at my location uses the Floridian Aquifer. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floridan_aquifer It's essentially a massive underground ocean of water... the mother-load of groundwater sources. It doesn't really seem like it's possible for it to be exhausted either, seeing as how the layers above the aquifer are all permeable and the rainfall here is above average. To be honest, such a vast and renewable source of mostly clean water is like sitting on a mountain of gold.
@@roblaquiere8220: wow thats pretty cool. i guess it makes the american lawn semi feasable in a few places. bet it still requires a bit of remediation but probably not as much since the wet climate promotes more rapid decay of older plant material
Ah yes, I've driven by that water tower in my hometown for over 20 years and began to finally wonder if it really does anything. You learn something new every day
I have an interview coming up for a hydraulic modelling engineer position, and this video is just the perfect summary of how the water distribution network works. Thanks for summarising so well. This will come in handy for my revision
I do not think it's as simple as you put it. Sophisticated planning based on various considerations and scenarios need to be undertaken to come up with a fit for purpose water infrastructure network. Planning needs to also take into consideration future expansion and that's where zoning comes in. So in my opinion this is no simple topic - it is just taken for granted. I really appreciate the work that the town planning teams do - Kudos to them👏👋👏👍🙏
I am a FireFighter in a fairly small town in Ga, the town has about 12,000 residents. The local landfill operator was VERY unaware of the need to keep the pile covered as much as possible and actually told me spontaneous combustion from decay was a myth, so guess what happened one day after a torrential rain came through. Yep the pile caught fire. At max flow we were pumping over 7,500 gallons of water an hour onto it and that was only to keep it from flaring so high it caught the surrounding buildings on fire. Over a 7 day period we put over 4,000,000 gallons on it. The water came from the towns water supply that we had to truck to the scene in tankers and tenders but it all came from the town. We put such a strain that the local water dept sent out notices that the pressure had to be cut in half and that severe drought water restrictions were in place until the fire was over. Thank God for the the rains because the over flowing river where the water was taken from fed the water dept, had it been at normal flow rate, we would have not had enough water to fight it. Oh and btw, if you were wondering the heaviest flow stopped after just 3 days because the state came in with a massive trash pump and set up 6 ag sprinklers on the pile and just used the runoff from what we had pumped on as their water source. We had to spray some areas that they couldn't reach but only when it flared.
@@johnburns4017 in this case, yes. When biological matter is decomposing the bacteria will cause it to heat up. When the heat reaches the point of ignition and there is available oxygen it will ignite. The bacteria is fed by the rain and thus the water will susequently cause a fire if the items decomposing arent kept cool enough, or kept away from oxygen by being covered up. Hay will do the same thing. If a farmer bales the hay when there is too much moisture left in the grass, it will heat up sufficiently to catch fire. Some of the worst fires I have ever fought were because of the spontaneous combustion of organic material
@@southronjr1570 thx. I know of some farmers who store manure on a concrete base, which also heats up, which has water pipes running through. The water is heated so free hot water.
Im a plumbing apprentice and didn’t know how water towers worked until I watched this video. It’s pretty cool that city-provided water from water towers are literally just a GIANT version of how a single house that has well-pump provided water gets it’s water out of the earth. Water well-pumps push water from a deep hole in the ground, through some pipes, and then water gets inside the house and usually 20-40 gallons of water is stored in a water storage tank AKA pressure tank. When the pressure tank has a satisfactory amount of pressure for what it is designed for, then the well pump stops pumping water to the house until the people inside the house use enough water that the tank needs to be somewhat refilled.
Former water utility employee here with about 30 years involvement in every aspect of operating and maintaining the water produced and delivered directly to your property. You did really well with your quick and dirty explanations of the processes. Kudos to you.
That's the thing that occurred to me watching the video: that the water tower evens out pressure like a smoothing capacitor with a power supply evens out current.
@@AMcAFaves I'd rather say, it's a battery. At some point, battery and capacitor may work the same way, but capacitors can be charged much faster and give you much more current, while batteries are slowly charged and can't give you a lot current in comparison to capacitors. Also, capacitor can't sotre it's energy for too long, it will self-discharge quite fast(it takes a lot of time for battery). So water tower, you slowly "charge" it with water overnight and it's slowly discharging it durning peak hours and water may be stored there, theoreticly, forever(it's another topic, that this water won't be safe to use after some time because of bacteria etc.).
This video is so excellent. One clarification about pressure zones though, is they don't necessarily each need their own water tower/reservoir. They can be accomplished by a city-owned pressure reducing valve :)
I really liked the b-roll you used in this one, reminded me of the type of stuff you’d see on tv. I really appreciate the polished look of your videos.
I am loving these. My second-grader was learning reluctantly about artesian wells, so we watched this video. She was very impressed and genuinely interested in all the wide-reaching, practical implications of artificial artesian wells. Thank you!!
Just like a minute ago, I was thinking of water towers.. the fact that how water coming from the tap uses power, but in an indirect way, because the work has been done beforehand in pumps lifting the water up high, to make the water pressure.. and then I come back to my computer and find that you made a video about water towers!! Amazing :D
As the video did hint at this does depend rather on the region where you live, while this is usually the case when all the land surrounding the settlement is fairly flat in the case of settlements that are for example nestled into a valley at the foot of a range of hills or mountains the system will often take advantage of the topography to make use of gravity feeding as much as possible. Even if it requires maintaining several kilometers of extra pipe and valves it still often easily outweighs the cost of paying the electric company for power when you can get gravity to provide all the power you need for free. It's certainly a politically charged issue and having to resort to removing humans does generally add significantly to both costs and the time to actually get the necessary approvals to get started on the project but it can and does happen.
Can't wait for the pumped water electricity storage video, I feel like that technique is especially important for the future of clean energy w/r/t meeting demand at peak.
@Nicola Sabbadini If you swap the words uninhabited for lightly populated it's probably closer to the truth, use of eminent domain/compulsory purchase powers to enable a civil engineering project to go ahead is not out of the question. Wouldn't be the first or last time that an entire village has been acquired with government authority on the grounds that the creation of the reservoir was in the public interest and the village was unfortunate enough to happen to be in the way. It's pretty unlikely if there are like 10's of thousands of people living there but certainly a village or small town of several hundred to a few thousand could be at risk maybe even into the low 10's of thousands if it happens to be unlucky enough to occupy particularly prime real estate for such a project.
@Nicola Sabbadini I'm not sure what you mean by not so great... There literally isn't any other way to story several Mega Watts of electricity... I mean there is research in several other types, like flywheels, actually making fossil fuels via algea and smartgrids/ smartappliances that use more energy when there is more. So unless I'm missing something this "not that great" is more like the only way we currently have...
@Nicola Sabbadini The buying/selling option isn't the same though, as a whole there will still be periods of overcapacity. Lastly assuming batteries with their expensive production process which is also devastating for nature will ever be used to store several mega Watts of power, or better said capable of delivering several mega Watts for several hours is quite unlikely. Not only because batteries are already hitting the limits to what can be stored safely with today's technology, any significant increases would also increase the danger of fires and explosions. But also because the technology to turn alternating current into direct current and vice versa is while very doable also quite expensive. Add to that the ever growing CO2 concerns and just pumping water higher might not be such a bad solution.
Nicola Sabbadini there are currently more than 80 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage capacity around the world, with another 15 GW under construction (the largest, Fengning in China, is 3.6 GW). Clearly *someone* thinks pumped hydro is a part of the solution for grid storage. There are a few other storage solutions currently operating (China has a bunch of Vanadium batteries in Liaoning good for almost 1 GW, the Andasol power station in Granada, Spain has about 1 GW of heat energy storage in their molten salt system, similar capacity at others like Solana in Arizona) but in total they add up to less than 10 GW (probably less than 5, actually; many are only small scale pilots like the Temporal Power flywheel storage system in Ontario that are less than 10 MW in capacity).
The tank style at 0:44 is called a Multi-Leg or Toro Ellipsoidal tank. 4:59 is a Composite Elevated Tank or CET. It's called Composite because of the concrete pedestal and steel bowl combination, no fiberglass used. We call the tank shown at 5:20 the "Witches hat" tank style. 6:00 is a Standpipe.
I studied mechanical engineering in college and I have been working for a company the builds water treatment plants. I just want to say that I love your videos and find them very informative.
I saw this video years ago back when I was in school, conceptual physics class to be specific. This video and that teacher has driven me into mechanical engineering and I just found your channel again today. Love the stuff and keep at it! You have inspired many to fix the problems of today!
@kicox1 -- When I wrote that comment, the number of views was about 250,000. I found it hard to believe that so many people were interested in water towers.
Just want to say keep up the great work. I just completed a 4 year MEng Engineering course over in the UK and I have learnt so much from your videos. Also, because I am very pedantic, in 2:21, positive charge flows from high to low voltage so electrons actually flow from low to high voltage. Anyway, I am sure you knew that but just thought I'd point that out as a fellow engineer!
I live directly across the street from a water tower, and my water pressure is always great as well as always having crystal clear water, no floaties or sediment. That particular water tower in the video is where I grew up right down the road from me in Cibolo, Tx. I pass by it several times a week. "Cibolo" was the local Native American word for buffalo back in their day, hence the buffalo outline. I attended Samuel Clemens high school which, of course, their mascot is the Mighty Buffalo.
OMG!!! The Kinzua Dam holding tank(7:11)!!! That is my neck of the woods! You can drive right up to the tank. It is 3miles in circumference. This holding tank is pretty famous. It was also in my college text books on power systems. I am an EE, and been following your channel to learn more about civil applications. The rumors of the town are that when the USACE were digging out the holding tank, dump trucks at the bottom of the tank looked like match box cars. If you ever want to see the tank, look up Jake Rocks in the Allegheny National Forest. It is a free camping ground and the road takes you to the tank. The Allegheny National Forest is a nice place to go on a vacation.
I'm a Certified Irrigation Contractor. While we learn and discuss water dynamics from an irrigation perspective, the greater water supply system is not necessarily part of our knowledge base. This was fascinating and well enjoyed. I will use this video in my training of employees because it will contribute to our greater understanding of the way water works.
Turn off the main water valve to your house for 4 hours and you'll quickly have a whole new appreciation for your system. Turn it off for 3 days, only using water gallons from the store to do everyday things around the house and you'll realize just how much water we waste day to day. Its mind blowing
I'll never forget what I heard a scientist say in an interview. He said there has never been another drop of water created since the formation of the Earth. So technically, every glass of water you've ever consumed, is dinosaur pee! Rather graphic, but it drove the point home very effectively!
As an engineer for a municipal Water district, I found this presentation to be very well done and simply explained. I will make use of it for others. 👍👍👍
Am I tripping or did he say it backwards? Electrons move from Low voltage to High Voltage! I think he was thinking of classically described current (movement of protons).
@@xxDPKINGxx Yes, the civil engineer missed a quirk in Bohr's atomic model while dealing with fluid dynamics and hydrostatics. I wouldn't worry about it. I'm an electrical engineer, and most of the time, I don't bother to think about which way the amber moves. It's usually a voltage, producing a current, creating magnetic flux, which induces a current somewhere else, leading to a voltage drop over some load impedance; or a signal voltage interacting with a transistor or relay as part of a logic operation. The fact that electrons are defined to have a negative charge does not meaningfully impact my day job.
Was surprised that he didn't mention capacitors and filtering out high frequency waves... I mean if you're starting with a comparison you may as well keep going!
I like that not only did you explain the storage aspect, but the pressure aspect; it would be interesting to see this applied to Roman water systems where they had no electric pumps.
You know I only thought about the power outage usage, smoothing out demand peaks never occurred to me. And it's kind of crazy how there's a 1-1 comparison between water storage and energy storage in terms of smoothing out demand and increasing efficiency.
A water tower is like a capacitor or rechargeable battery --- it releases copious intervals of flow when needed, and then stores the water during periods of less demand. :D P.S. That's what a savings-account is supposed to be for, too --- you put in extra money as you get it, and then it can be heavily drawn upon during an emergency. The problem is that many folks cannot resist spending money on stuff that they don't need, and so they are not able to save up much.
"The problem is that many folks cannot resist spending money", uhh no, it isn't. Spoken like someone who doesn't know poverty. The PROBLEM is that many folks cannot make a living wage and the concept of saving is a complete fucking joke because respect for the working class has become completely abysmal, not to mention profiteering financial institutions being the cultural norm, education prices (both public and private) being absolutely hysterically gouged, etc etc etc. There are SO MANY problems that come down the line before "people have no self control" that it's an insult to even suggest that it's a substantial issue. Corporate profits are at an all time high and the concentration of wealth within the upper classes is more severe than ever before in the history of this planet, BY A WIDE MARGIN, and that's including the times when kingdoms and emperors were the way the world was run for thousands of years before modern governmental systems came of age.
@@kylezo I agree that this is true for many people. I was merely saying that some people would indeed have enough if they practiced sensible frugality and saving, the way I do. I am merely on SSI and Food Stamps, but I manage okay on just those few hundred bucks a month; that's only possible through very thrifty living and careful budgeting, though.
Fantastic video Grady. As an EIT in the southwest states, it was awesome hearing how eastern states like NY have to deal with pressure and flow challenges of terrain and tall buildings. I am finally getting to work with some high rise structures in land development and this put a lot of perspective on how every every water distribution challenge eventually comes back to Bernoulli's energy principle.
Retired now but I worked for 27 years in the water treatment industry . Very good presentation you did on what water towers/standpipes are all about . You touched on all the key points . Another interesting effect of having a water tower in the distribution system is how they protect the distribution pipe system from breakage due to sudden pressure variance . The tower being essentially an open ended vessel in a closed piping system gives it the ability to absorb and moderate sudden changes in pressure in the system such as a large consumer stopping use of their water or a fire hydrant being close . The increase in pressure gets a chance to " escape " into the tower if the pumping system isn't able to react quickly enough to the change in demand .
You sure we don't use water towers anymore? The historical ones yes thoose all serve other purposes now but i think they are combined with other buildings. Though might also just be private owned water tower the one im thinking of
@@chadoftoons There are water reservoirs for fire protection. Pretty much every village has them but no water towers, at least I haven't seen any. As Grady has mentioned in the video, the towers have their own downsides, like contruction and maintenance cost. If the numbers don't add up, don't build them.
127x99mm Agghhhhhhh.... and this is why I’m not going into electrical engineering. I’m sure I’d get it eventually, but I’ll stick with civil and analyzing beams and trusses.
@Dave Cockayne Benjamin Franklin getting it wrong is not a problem. There is a problem when those who have the technology to prove the factual direction refuse to change for the sake of tradition, thereby putting tradition above truth. There are a great deal of Pharisees in our day and age, they just go by different names.
I was about to say that but then I found this comment. Current flows from high to low voltage. Electron follow the opposite trend, thanks to Benjamin Franklin :D
Electrons themselves are charged. What kind of charge you talking about? Positive or negative? How does electron flow from charge to charge? I bet "potential" makes much more sense to most people.
During a freeze everyone in my small town started running taps to prevent pipe freezing. Then we were alerted the water was unsafe to drink due to bacteria. Now I understand why. Thank you for contributions!
I'm not an engineer and neither work in a related field, however I love watching your videos and learning. Your videos are always delivered in an easy to understand format. Thanks Grady.
hi! i work in the field of water distribution. i actually watched your video for a laugh. but, i was pleasantly surprised by the accuracy and clear explanations. BRAVO! one thing you could have included was the point 43 pound rule. for every foot of height of the tower you gain point 43 pounds of pressure. so a 100 foot tower would passively impart exactly 43 pounds of pressure at ground level. i subbed. good video.
That ad hoc "rule" is an example of how bad imperial system of measure is. With pascals/bars and meters you don't need a special constant here, you just use g. So 100 meters tower would produce 9.8 bars of pressure at ground level.
In addition to reducing peak demand from pumps, elevated water tanks also reduce the required size of some water mains since peak flows don't all have to come from the plant at once and provide storage should the water plant go down for a number of hours.
This is a GREAT Video. Well done! It walks you through the basics so anyone can understand why the need. I'm 33yr's in Public Water and sometimes we forget that a lot of people only know that you turn on a faucet. Thank you!
Excellent! My daughter has been asking how the city water tower works and I have been stumbling through with "well, I am not sure, but I think...". Now I know! :D
The moment when you realize that something so "simple" has so much thought put into it. Really glad that channels like this and others exist, here you really learn the interesting and useful stuff, not at school sadly : /
Thank you. I just recently joined the Board of Public Affairs and took my first tour of my village's water system. Now that I know the location of things, this video has helped me better understand how it works.
Can't wait for the pumped-hydro episode you alluded to. It would interesting to know how much water at a given height would be needed to power a home for, say, 24 hours.
I'd be interested in toying with the idea of using consumer-sized water storage tanks to store energy during off-peak hours. This way, you use energy from the grid when it's cheap and then convert that potential energy back into electricity during peak grid hours. I'm assuming that the only reason why we don't do this now is because it's an economy of scale sort of thing.
That's easy to work out. If you know your house uses, say, 30 kWh in a day, that's 108 MJ of energy. That's equivalent to raising 100 metric tons of water (about 110 US tons, or about 26,500 US gallons) to a height of about 110 metres (about 361 feet). However, that's at 100% efficiency, and if it's 80% efficient (good for pumped storage), that means multiplying by 1.25, so 138 metres or 451 feet. To put that in perspective, a typical 2,000 square foot US house weighs, with its contents, about 205 US tons, so it's the equivalent of lifting the entire house vertically by about 220 feet. The simple formulas used are to turn kWh into MJ, multiply the former by 3.6. As gravitational potential energy is just mgh where m is the mass in kg, g is the acceleration due to gravity (9.81 m/s^2) and h is the height in metres. Now take these numbers and multiply them by the number of houses in a large city and you'll see the scale of storage required.
@@jc_1337 The energy storage capacity is trivial for domestic water tanks. Raise 1,000 US gallons of water (which weighs about 4.2 US tons) by 25 feet (that is roughly two storeys), and it will store the equivalent of less than 0.08 kWh of electricity as gravitational potential energy. However, as the whole operation is 80% efficient at best, then you'll only get about 0.06 kWh back. That's rather less than the electrical energy stored in a 4 Ah 18V battery for a cordless drill (which is around 0.07 kWh).
Most RUclips videos I watch, I play them minimized in a corner or as I do other things. You videos graphics and clips are so good that I usually watch … actually watch the video.
A lot of my family members live in a small city that is known for having a lot of water towers. I never thought about how they worked, mostly at awe at the size of all of them. Now knowing the fundamentals on how they work, it's amazing and genius how the water system works there and in other populations!
Note that it doesn't have to be a tower, you can put water tanks at the top of natural hills just as well. I think my town does only this, and due to this the towers continue to look weird to me whenever I see them in other places with no natural hills.
Er zijn 175 watertorens in Nederland, maar ze hoeven niet heel hoog te zijn (dus ze vallen niet altijd evenveel op) en zijn eigenlijk altijd van steen gemaakt.
Its fascinating remembering that water pressure is entirely dictated by density, gravity, and the height of a fluid column, no matter how big around the column is! So its so cool that we exploit that by raising up a small portion of water to give everything below it the same pressure as if the entire area were submerged below the column. I’ve never thought about that before and its so cool to see the practicality of it!
Clean, potable, reliable water source is a very underrated blessing of modern civilization. Why don't all water towers freeze in winter? I know of a story where a small town in Indiana had a water tower that froze one February back in the late 1980's. It collapsed from the water and ice load leaving residents without water for months.
Mom is 74, and she asked, "Hey, how does the city know that when we open our hose, that we need water?" I said, "I bet it has to do with our water tower, and I bet Grady can tell us all about it." Thanks!
This is an excellent video because you methodically walk through the original needs, the solutions, the problems with the solution, and so on. It perfectly motivates the water tower design.
Yes, this video format needs to stick around. I'll chime in and say, though, any chance for some more attention to rural infrastructure? I live in the sticks, and while I understand a good bit (mostly on the electrical side of things, my dad was a lineman when I was a kid), there's still plenty I'd like to see addressed.
Maybe YOU dont, but plenty of others do. In my town Rush hour is between 7-8am meaning you have had to get up at 6 to shower, brush teeth, have a shit etc before making your way to work, and in that 1hr alone, over 20,000 vehicles will make their way through the only ONE road out of town if going north (To Bristol where all the jobs are) This means cos of the ONE road, there are massive tailbacks, so some people have to get up even earlier to try and counteract this queue during the morning rush just to make it into work on time.
Lol engineering is quite awesome. Btw please do a video on the strength of framed structures vs load bearing structures. I think the former are stronger but I can't find any literature to confirm that.
Great video! In Montreal we don't see water towers, but the city took advantage of the "mountain" at the center of the city. Reservoirs were dug in the mountain at different elevations to act like water towers.
This illustration gives a great overview of the Montreal water distribution system : ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/PAGE/EAU_FR/MEDIA/DOCUMENTS/stations_pompage_reservoirs_territoire_usines.pdf
@@robbiebenka8078 Ahh okay. Thanks alot. Another question. Does everybody in the english world understand the 24 hour format? In school we often got the statement, that many english speaking natives are not familiar with the 24 hour format and can't operate with it. Not because they are dumb or so just because they don't learn it. Was there a change with this?
Just an idea, but you could also have a series for Mechanical Engineering and how mechanical systems work - you could have short videos on how different mechanisms and machines work, and their development over time. JUST AND IDEA :D
hi i just wanna say thank you for making these videos. I recently started a new job as an assistant water operator and your videos helped me. Thank you.
Here in Canada, water towers are disappearing; the one in Lethbridge, Alberta was converted into an elevated restaurant. I would be curious to know what type of technology is replacing them.
@Tubmaster 5000 Booster systems. and frequency variable pumps a booster system its a small tank usually in the attic. which has a small pump, water from the city comes in, then the small pump in the attic will "boost" the pressure of the water to the required value. so basically its a tiny water tower inside your house. now these come in different shapes and sizes of course, you have booster systems which provide for entire cities or towns, you also have much smaller ones that provide for a single building. same here in The Netherlands about water towers disappearing. at one point in history we had over 260, only about 170 remain these days, and less then 50 of them are still in use. but this is because building houses with one of those small booster systems became the standard here in i would say the 50's or 60's. most of the water towers here have also been converted to restaurants or bed and breakfast type places.
@@mouthpiece200 i believe its not actually. here in the NL it costs much more money to maintain our large water towers, then it does to maintain our household booster/boiler systems. what does an avarage water tower cost to build ? 100.000 dollars? more then that? we just had the entire system in our house replaced for less then 500 dollars. in the past 20 years we also have not need any inspection or regular maintenance on our in house system. how many times does a water tower need inspection/maintainance over its life time? and how much will that cost over the towers life time? every house having their own system is way more cost effective, especially when you take into account that you'll probably only have to replace it once in your life time. (the system we had removed had ran for 50 years) now our new system is ready to go for another 50 or so
@@mouthpiece200 A lot of the benefits have solely to do with regulations on disinfection byproducts. In larger tanks, the water 'age' is higher as it's not being cycled through as much. It has time to basically stagnate and form DBPs, then when you exceed these DBPs on mandated testings it requires very expensive public notifications, reviews, engineering consults, and such.
That’s wrong. Electrons move from high electric potential to low electric potential. Don’t confuse electronics notation with what actually happens in nature.
Great video. A neighbor of mine built water towers in the area and I never quite frankly understood their purpose. I knew they provided pressurized water, but I did not factor in the timely aspect of their functionality. This simple video provided clarity to something I have always been curious about. Keep up the good work.
"Public Works" is a new video format I'm trying out. Let me know if you like it, and if so, what topics you'd like me to cover in the future!
Sewage systems? Or maybe telecoms. infrastructures?
I'm interested to know more about how water is treated before it makes its way back into the natural cycle. There must be such a wide range of pollutants that must be accounted for like biological elements and toxic chemicals. Some of which make there way into the system inadvertently from run-off, others through careless\deliberate disposal.
I absolutely think this type of videos is not only quite interesting, but even of public service. I loved it and would like to see more of the kind!
Great video! How are water towers cleaned on the inside?
Really nice series ! I also really enjoy the bump in production quality !
Hi Grady, I am an older man and have been wondering how those tanks work for decades. Your explanation was first rate, especially the part about the “stored energy” contained in the water within the tower. Thank you for such a well done explanation. If my daughter was little again, I would love to watch your videos with her.
I believe a similar concept can be applied to the electrical grid, where electricity is produced in excess at low demand periods, so that there's extra during high demand periods. With water towers, the water is literally stored at a high elevation storing gravity potential energy.
Very fascinating...
If you have grandchildren, watch the videos with them. I'm sure they're just as inquisitive
Why not tell your daughter this made you think of her, and maybe still watch it with her? 😀
The cheap, reliable access to water via taps is probably the single most underrated thing about developed countries.
@Brandon Martin not true for most countries (the drinkable part)
@@dscarmo Aye! India here.
Isn't it beautiful what capitalism has given us?
The systematically poisoned water via taps is probably the single most terrible thing about developed countries.
@@dscarmo Right, the non-industrialized countries have the best water. Cities have poison (fluoride) "for our teeth"
Water towers also provide another mildly interesting service, by dint of their being tall and easy to spot: Navigational aids for low-flying aircraft. Pilots can use particular towns as waypoints and use the water towers to verify their location. In case you ever wondered why your local water tower probably has your town's name in huge letters painted on it.
Nowadays with widely available GPS devices it virtually has 0 value
Vyacheslav Kononenko, it still is useful for a lot if pilots. VFR flying is still popular among private and sports pilots as a recreational activity. Nowadays most VFR planes have some GNSS device onboard as a back up but not as a primary nav aid.
@@bumbarabun Pilots are still taught and use DED Reckoning. it is part of being a pilot. You have to know what to do when all that tech in your cockpit fails. and it will fail.it is a question of when, not if.
@Sean Lacey the fact that you did it does not mean it has any value. I doubt they would keep them in sake of navigation for people who want to keep old habits if need as water reservoir would not be there anymore.
Studying right now, this is good to know, thanks.
Notice at 9:20 the bands on the wooden water tanks are closer together at the bottom, where the pressure is higher nearer the bottom. Wider spacing as they go up.
Excellent observation!
Very interesting video. For 12 years I was chief engineer in the pump house at the Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. The museum was built around the pump house which was opened in July 1877 to supply water to Auckland city. The boiler room contained four 30’ long Lancashire boilers which supplied steam to the double compound beam engine in the engine room next door. The engine drove two pumps which took water from Western Springs Lake to reservoirs in Ponsonby and in Kyber Pass Road, from where it was then gravity fed down to the city.
As a result, I have always had a fascination with water and its supply and how without a water supply, you do not have a city.
Keep up the good work.
Good video, I am an electrician and I work primarily in this industry. We also use hydro-pneumatic storage tanks to store water under pressure with an air blanket to absorb water hammer and help regulate the pressure as it builds up via a pump and is lost through demand. Anyway, I watch your videos a lot and they are consistently good, thanks for that!
I wanted to comment how hydraulic shock wasn’t mentioned :)
@Provocateur What colour fugitives will we have in the 21st century?
Here in Brazil, depending on the region, almost every home has some kind of water storage. Specially in remote areas that have little to no infrastructure like the north and northeast of the country, the Amazon included. We're taught to design homes with storage for at least 2 days due to the systems being unreliable. Larger structures are also required to allocate a significant percentage of their daily water usage to be used exclusively for firefighting as there aren't any expressive quantities of hydrants in the country.
Damn, that kind of sucks. It's funny how the first world nations take something like water on tap at all times for granted
That was interesting, thanks for sharing how your country handles water.
Same in rural Thailand
Less so in modern houses, but lots do in the UK too. Many houses have a water tank in the loft (attic) that serves bathroom taps (sinks, showers, baths, toilet) and then the kitchen tap is linked to the mains water supply. Growing up in an older house meant if you drank water from the bathroom tap it was a bit stale and tainted, but fresh as a daisy in the kitchen!
Note: in Brazil, the "individual water storage" ("house water storage"), its mostly called "Water Box".
It’s crazy how comfortable we get and take some of the “simple” things for granted.
Great video. Thx for sharing.
Life still boring, we still need money, we still got rent to pay. We atill live with anxiety.
@@AM-lz2jr do you think the pumps run for free? Of course you need to work and contribute to the system you live on
@@Mipetz38 doesnt make it any less depressing
I used to be a water plant operator in my home town years ago. Nice to see a video explaining the use and importance of a water tower. Ours held 100,000 gallons of treated water when at capacity. Very handy thing to have when there were power outages or serious water pipeline breaks
I work on pumps every day. Supplying the irrigation needs for the many golf courses in my area is a huge industry by itself. They need pressurized water to run all of their different sprinkler systems. Lawn grass is the largest cash crop in America after all.
@I Am Sekou: lawn grass maintenance accounts for a majority of water use despite not producing anything of value (unless you count aesthetics).
they tend to be invasive/non-native European species which do not survive well in the native climate and require vast quantities of additional water and frequent soil remediation.
I went to Palm Springs in the summer.... as a European, seeing the vast swathes of green land in the middle of a dessert was a crazy sight. I can't see how this is sustainable long term? But I don't know anything about how this water is sourced.
@@StealthElectronVIP The service company that supplies the golf courses, well anything really, with water at my location uses the Floridian Aquifer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floridan_aquifer
It's essentially a massive underground ocean of water... the mother-load of groundwater sources. It doesn't really seem like it's possible for it to be exhausted either, seeing as how the layers above the aquifer are all permeable and the rainfall here is above average.
To be honest, such a vast and renewable source of mostly clean water is like sitting on a mountain of gold.
@@roblaquiere8220: wow thats pretty cool. i guess it makes the american lawn semi feasable in a few places. bet it still requires a bit of remediation but probably not as much since the wet climate promotes more rapid decay of older plant material
@@StealthElectronVIP
They steal it/divert it from the people under color of law, lies, misinformation and propaganda. (Just sayin)
Ah yes, I've driven by that water tower in my hometown for over 20 years and began to finally wonder if it really does anything. You learn something new every day
Me too. Didn't realize what gravity was until this video.
What u learned that day u shouldve learned 20 yrs ago . this way u couldve learned something else the day u learned about the tower.
@@lrodriguez9315 This makes no sense.
@@Aoredon its ok buddy someday you will.
@@lrodriguez9315 It will*
I have an interview coming up for a hydraulic modelling engineer position, and this video is just the perfect summary of how the water distribution network works. Thanks for summarising so well. This will come in handy for my revision
How did the interview go?
@@tomrogue13 I got the job:)
@@nidhigilson5197 awesome!
It's amazing how such a simple topic can be so interesting. Thank you
I do not think it's as simple as you put it. Sophisticated planning based on various considerations and scenarios need to be undertaken to come up with a fit for purpose water infrastructure network. Planning needs to also take into consideration future expansion and that's where zoning comes in. So in my opinion this is no simple topic - it is just taken for granted.
I really appreciate the work that the town planning teams do - Kudos to them👏👋👏👍🙏
I guess you meant to say - a topic that SEEMS so simple .........
It's all in the delivery!
I am a FireFighter in a fairly small town in Ga, the town has about 12,000 residents. The local landfill operator was VERY unaware of the need to keep the pile covered as much as possible and actually told me spontaneous combustion from decay was a myth, so guess what happened one day after a torrential rain came through. Yep the pile caught fire. At max flow we were pumping over 7,500 gallons of water an hour onto it and that was only to keep it from flaring so high it caught the surrounding buildings on fire. Over a 7 day period we put over 4,000,000 gallons on it. The water came from the towns water supply that we had to truck to the scene in tankers and tenders but it all came from the town. We put such a strain that the local water dept sent out notices that the pressure had to be cut in half and that severe drought water restrictions were in place until the fire was over. Thank God for the the rains because the over flowing river where the water was taken from fed the water dept, had it been at normal flow rate, we would have not had enough water to fight it. Oh and btw, if you were wondering the heaviest flow stopped after just 3 days because the state came in with a massive trash pump and set up 6 ag sprinklers on the pile and just used the runoff from what we had pumped on as their water source. We had to spray some areas that they couldn't reach but only when it flared.
What is a _pile?_
@@johnburns4017 in this case it was the burning pile of garbage that was exposed that was 3 stories tall.
@@southronjr1570
The rain caused a fire?
@@johnburns4017 in this case, yes. When biological matter is decomposing the bacteria will cause it to heat up. When the heat reaches the point of ignition and there is available oxygen it will ignite. The bacteria is fed by the rain and thus the water will susequently cause a fire if the items decomposing arent kept cool enough, or kept away from oxygen by being covered up. Hay will do the same thing. If a farmer bales the hay when there is too much moisture left in the grass, it will heat up sufficiently to catch fire. Some of the worst fires I have ever fought were because of the spontaneous combustion of organic material
@@southronjr1570
thx. I know of some farmers who store manure on a concrete base, which also heats up, which has water pipes running through. The water is heated so free hot water.
Im a plumbing apprentice and didn’t know how water towers worked until I watched this video. It’s pretty cool that city-provided water from water towers are literally just a GIANT version of how a single house that has well-pump provided water gets it’s water out of the earth.
Water well-pumps push water from a deep hole in the ground, through some pipes, and then water gets inside the house and usually 20-40 gallons of water is stored in a water storage tank AKA pressure tank. When the pressure tank has a satisfactory amount of pressure for what it is designed for, then the well pump stops pumping water to the house until the people inside the house use enough water that the tank needs to be somewhat refilled.
Former water utility employee here with about 30 years involvement in every aspect of operating and maintaining the water produced and delivered directly to your property. You did really well with your quick and dirty explanations of the processes. Kudos to you.
*I don’t know what it it with RUclips and water towers...* just yesterday I was suggested “Water Tower Falling”
Same dude
@@EEEEEEE354 same sis
Same
I just got recommended today
Same though
So a water tower is a capacitor. Funny that I've normally heard circuits/electronics explained in terms of water/plumbing, not the other way around.
It's not so much a capacitor as it is a battery.
That's the thing that occurred to me watching the video: that the water tower evens out pressure like a smoothing capacitor with a power supply evens out current.
@@kennyholmes5196 What are the important distinctions in the analogy between a water tower and a capacitor versus a battery?
Because electricity and water flow are very similiar, but water is easier to understand and imagine, so may be used to explain electricity.
@@AMcAFaves I'd rather say, it's a battery. At some point, battery and capacitor may work the same way, but capacitors can be charged much faster and give you much more current, while batteries are slowly charged and can't give you a lot current in comparison to capacitors. Also, capacitor can't sotre it's energy for too long, it will self-discharge quite fast(it takes a lot of time for battery).
So water tower, you slowly "charge" it with water overnight and it's slowly discharging it durning peak hours and water may be stored there, theoreticly, forever(it's another topic, that this water won't be safe to use after some time because of bacteria etc.).
This video is so excellent. One clarification about pressure zones though, is they don't necessarily each need their own water tower/reservoir. They can be accomplished by a city-owned pressure reducing valve :)
Up next, how wine towers work!
Jesus, you are everywhere!
You want the entire town drinking your blood? No thanks. I’m on board for a beer tower tho
"Jesus christ" you're every where!!
Jesus Christ, I see you everywhere.
Jesus Christ you need to touch the water tower my dude
I really liked the b-roll you used in this one, reminded me of the type of stuff you’d see on tv. I really appreciate the polished look of your videos.
Except where he used stock video of an electrical grid while talking about water distribution.
I am loving these. My second-grader was learning reluctantly about artesian wells, so we watched this video. She was very impressed and genuinely interested in all the wide-reaching, practical implications of artificial artesian wells. Thank you!!
Gravity is not only a good idea, it's the law.
No
Yes, it is the law. It is strictly enforced. 😉
Wait... oh shit i think I hear sirens.
@@Bellboy40 🤣🤣
Gravity is a theory
Ah yes the gravity outage of 1908
Seize the means of Gravitation
The gravity is down!
That was one hell of a storm! Zeus was so mad, he just went “F it! You can all float around for all I care!”.
My grandfather survived it. Just imagine if it were to happen in a big city...
Dave Cockayne
Everything went up. And sideways too.
So it's basically a capacitor.. for water.
Gravity battery
Get out of my mind
That's another way of looking at it.
Exactly what I thought!
calculator made of water tanks!!!
Just like a minute ago, I was thinking of water towers.. the fact that how water coming from the tap uses power, but in an indirect way, because the work has been done beforehand in pumps lifting the water up high, to make the water pressure.. and then I come back to my computer and find that you made a video about water towers!! Amazing :D
Satanic forces brought you here. He wants you to learn.
@@vmelkon that sneaky devil that Satan. Trying to get us learn and think
As the video did hint at this does depend rather on the region where you live, while this is usually the case when all the land surrounding the settlement is fairly flat in the case of settlements that are for example nestled into a valley at the foot of a range of hills or mountains the system will often take advantage of the topography to make use of gravity feeding as much as possible. Even if it requires maintaining several kilometers of extra pipe and valves it still often easily outweighs the cost of paying the electric company for power when you can get gravity to provide all the power you need for free.
It's certainly a politically charged issue and having to resort to removing humans does generally add significantly to both costs and the time to actually get the necessary approvals to get started on the project but it can and does happen.
the uses of the pumps are not eactly like that ince they got tons of cons but in general ye
@@vmelkon this is so weird... I was at an outdoor party earlier and was also wondering how that water tower in the distance works
I can see the details, the care, and every "hmmm let me say that differently" behind every part of the video. Much appreciated fam
Can't wait for the pumped water electricity storage video, I feel like that technique is especially important for the future of clean energy w/r/t meeting demand at peak.
@Nicola Sabbadini If you swap the words uninhabited for lightly populated it's probably closer to the truth, use of eminent domain/compulsory purchase powers to enable a civil engineering project to go ahead is not out of the question. Wouldn't be the first or last time that an entire village has been acquired with government authority on the grounds that the creation of the reservoir was in the public interest and the village was unfortunate enough to happen to be in the way. It's pretty unlikely if there are like 10's of thousands of people living there but certainly a village or small town of several hundred to a few thousand could be at risk maybe even into the low 10's of thousands if it happens to be unlucky enough to occupy particularly prime real estate for such a project.
@Nicola Sabbadini I'm not sure what you mean by not so great... There literally isn't any other way to story several Mega Watts of electricity...
I mean there is research in several other types, like flywheels, actually making fossil fuels via algea and smartgrids/ smartappliances that use more energy when there is more.
So unless I'm missing something this "not that great" is more like the only way we currently have...
Sam go watch Tom Scott’s video on pumped hydro at ruclips.net/video/6Jx_bJglFhl/видео.html
@Nicola Sabbadini The buying/selling option isn't the same though, as a whole there will still be periods of overcapacity.
Lastly assuming batteries with their expensive production process which is also devastating for nature will ever be used to store several mega Watts of power, or better said capable of delivering several mega Watts for several hours is quite unlikely.
Not only because batteries are already hitting the limits to what can be stored safely with today's technology, any significant increases would also increase the danger of fires and explosions. But also because the technology to turn alternating current into direct current and vice versa is while very doable also quite expensive.
Add to that the ever growing CO2 concerns and just pumping water higher might not be such a bad solution.
Nicola Sabbadini there are currently more than 80 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage capacity around the world, with another 15 GW under construction (the largest, Fengning in China, is 3.6 GW).
Clearly *someone* thinks pumped hydro is a part of the solution for grid storage. There are a few other storage solutions currently operating (China has a bunch of Vanadium batteries in Liaoning good for almost 1 GW, the Andasol power station in Granada, Spain has about 1 GW of heat energy storage in their molten salt system, similar capacity at others like Solana in Arizona) but in total they add up to less than 10 GW (probably less than 5, actually; many are only small scale pilots like the Temporal Power flywheel storage system in Ontario that are less than 10 MW in capacity).
The tank style at 0:44 is called a Multi-Leg or Toro Ellipsoidal tank. 4:59 is a Composite Elevated Tank or CET. It's called Composite because of the concrete pedestal and steel bowl combination, no fiberglass used. We call the tank shown at 5:20 the "Witches hat" tank style. 6:00 is a Standpipe.
Well, gee, Bob. Now I feel complete.
I appreciate this useless info bob. Thanks for sharing your expertise
@@drumcorcaigh5770 A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Some folks are VERY dangerous.
I studied mechanical engineering in college and I have been working for a company the builds water treatment plants. I just want to say that I love your videos and find them very informative.
I saw this video years ago back when I was in school, conceptual physics class to be specific. This video and that teacher has driven me into mechanical engineering and I just found your channel again today. Love the stuff and keep at it! You have inspired many to fix the problems of today!
I appreciate the way you take complex subjects and articulate them in a easy to understand way. Thanks.
You are a magician. Within 24 hours, over a quarter of a million people stopped to watch a video about water towers.
@kicox1 -- When I wrote that comment, the number of views was about 250,000. I found it hard to believe that so many people were interested in water towers.
@kicox1 -- Yes, that's what I thought.
But how many fast forward as I did to get to the point.
P Martin I don’t. I only fast forward on the “hub” to get to the good stuff. Here, everything is interesting so I watch the entire video :)
Speak for yourself. I came for the sock ad at the end.
Just want to say keep up the great work. I just completed a 4 year MEng Engineering course over in the UK and I have learnt so much from your videos.
Also, because I am very pedantic, in 2:21, positive charge flows from high to low voltage so electrons actually flow from low to high voltage. Anyway, I am sure you knew that but just thought I'd point that out as a fellow engineer!
I live directly across the street from a water tower, and my water pressure is always great as well as always having crystal clear water, no floaties or sediment. That particular water tower in the video is where I grew up right down the road from me in Cibolo, Tx. I pass by it several times a week. "Cibolo" was the local Native American word for buffalo back in their day, hence the buffalo outline. I attended Samuel Clemens high school which, of course, their mascot is the Mighty Buffalo.
I wondered what that said, looked like abolo.
OMG!!! The Kinzua Dam holding tank(7:11)!!! That is my neck of the woods! You can drive right up to the tank. It is 3miles in circumference. This holding tank is pretty famous. It was also in my college text books on power systems. I am an EE, and been following your channel to learn more about civil applications. The rumors of the town are that when the USACE were digging out the holding tank, dump trucks at the bottom of the tank looked like match box cars.
If you ever want to see the tank, look up Jake Rocks in the Allegheny National Forest. It is a free camping ground and the road takes you to the tank. The Allegheny National Forest is a nice place to go on a vacation.
I'm a Certified Irrigation Contractor. While we learn and discuss water dynamics from an irrigation perspective, the greater water supply system is not necessarily part of our knowledge base. This was fascinating and well enjoyed. I will use this video in my training of employees because it will contribute to our greater understanding of the way water works.
I'm so grateful to have water. I feel like a lot of us take water for granted.
Definitely agree and I have had that thought many times in my life. Thank you, Lord.
Turn off the main water valve to your house for 4 hours and you'll quickly have a whole new appreciation for your system. Turn it off for 3 days, only using water gallons from the store to do everyday things around the house and you'll realize just how much water we waste day to day. Its mind blowing
Water has existed for humans entire existance and much longer. It’s not needed to act about it as if it’s a rare gift...
*granite
I'll never forget what I heard a scientist say in an interview.
He said there has never been another drop of water created since the formation of the Earth. So technically, every glass of water you've ever consumed, is dinosaur pee! Rather graphic, but it drove the point home very effectively!
As an engineer for a municipal Water district, I found this presentation to be very well done and simply explained. I will make use of it for others. 👍👍👍
I never heard anyone giving example of electrons to explain water flow. Always heard the opposite. Interesting take.
Am I tripping or did he say it backwards? Electrons move from Low voltage to High Voltage! I think he was thinking of classically described current (movement of protons).
@@xxDPKINGxx Yes, the civil engineer missed a quirk in Bohr's atomic model while dealing with fluid dynamics and hydrostatics. I wouldn't worry about it. I'm an electrical engineer, and most of the time, I don't bother to think about which way the amber moves. It's usually a voltage, producing a current, creating magnetic flux, which induces a current somewhere else, leading to a voltage drop over some load impedance; or a signal voltage interacting with a transistor or relay as part of a logic operation. The fact that electrons are defined to have a negative charge does not meaningfully impact my day job.
well, civil engineers. just sayin...
Well if you can't reverse an analogy there is something wrong ;)
Was surprised that he didn't mention capacitors and filtering out high frequency waves... I mean if you're starting with a comparison you may as well keep going!
Anyone who can make water towers interesting deserves high praise. Great job!
I like that not only did you explain the storage aspect, but the pressure aspect; it would be interesting to see this applied to Roman water systems where they had no electric pumps.
You know I only thought about the power outage usage, smoothing out demand peaks never occurred to me. And it's kind of crazy how there's a 1-1 comparison between water storage and energy storage in terms of smoothing out demand and increasing efficiency.
My 2 yo grandson is very impressed by water towers right now. Good video thanks.
That was a difficult subject matter to make interesting but somehow you done it and done it in style, great work!
A water tower is like a capacitor or rechargeable battery --- it releases copious intervals of flow when needed, and then stores the water during periods of less demand. :D
P.S. That's what a savings-account is supposed to be for, too --- you put in extra money as you get it, and then it can be heavily drawn upon during an emergency. The problem is that many folks cannot resist spending money on stuff that they don't need, and so they are not able to save up much.
Was gonna say the same thing.
"The problem is that many folks cannot resist spending money", uhh no, it isn't. Spoken like someone who doesn't know poverty. The PROBLEM is that many folks cannot make a living wage and the concept of saving is a complete fucking joke because respect for the working class has become completely abysmal, not to mention profiteering financial institutions being the cultural norm, education prices (both public and private) being absolutely hysterically gouged, etc etc etc. There are SO MANY problems that come down the line before "people have no self control" that it's an insult to even suggest that it's a substantial issue. Corporate profits are at an all time high and the concentration of wealth within the upper classes is more severe than ever before in the history of this planet, BY A WIDE MARGIN, and that's including the times when kingdoms and emperors were the way the world was run for thousands of years before modern governmental systems came of age.
How did you manage to turn a topic about batteries and water towers into a message of “Why don’t you just *not* be poor?”
@@kylezo I agree that this is true for many people. I was merely saying that some people would indeed have enough if they practiced sensible frugality and saving, the way I do. I am merely on SSI and Food Stamps, but I manage okay on just those few hundred bucks a month; that's only possible through very thrifty living and careful budgeting, though.
That's not how poverty works.
Explaining fluid pressure using analogy to electric voltage - beautiful savagery
Gravity was actually knocked offline for me one time during a black out! I never found out if Sandra Bullock made it safely back to Earth :(
I'm not sure either, but Jake Gyllenhaal did land safely with the sample.
She made it back to earth but she crashed in a lake in some wilderness, who knows on what continent. So I dunno if she's safe or not.
@@EvrSpd I think its Southeast asia
@@EvrSpd I heard she ended up in rehab with 27 dresses, you can contact her on the Net if you want to know more
@@ersu.t it's cool. She just passed me on the freeway driving a bus at about 55mph with what looked like keanu Reeves hanging over her shoulder.
I love how behind every invention, there's a "deep" sciense involved
Fantastic video Grady. As an EIT in the southwest states, it was awesome hearing how eastern states like NY have to deal with pressure and flow challenges of terrain and tall buildings. I am finally getting to work with some high rise structures in land development and this put a lot of perspective on how every every water distribution challenge eventually comes back to Bernoulli's energy principle.
Retired now but I worked for 27 years in the water treatment industry . Very good presentation you did on what water towers/standpipes are all about . You touched on all the key points . Another interesting effect of having a water tower in the distribution system is how they protect the distribution pipe system from breakage due to sudden pressure variance . The tower being essentially an open ended vessel in a closed piping system gives it the ability to absorb and moderate sudden changes in pressure in the system such as a large consumer stopping use of their water or a fire hydrant being close . The increase in pressure gets a chance to " escape " into the tower if the pumping system isn't able to react quickly enough to the change in demand .
Excellent point, sir. Only an experienced worker would understand that.
@@marktwain368 27 years in municipal water treatment and distribution gave me the chance to understand the intricacies .
We in Germany don't really have Water Towers (in use) anymore but it's still interesting how they worked.
So thanks a lot for that Video 👍
So u guys are dependent mostly on pumps ?
I could imagine having an air-pressure-tank in the system to cope with rapid changes in demand. Does anybody know how its actually done?
@@pardeepsinghbajwa5097 Power outages are virtually unheard of so that's no problem.
You sure we don't use water towers anymore? The historical ones yes thoose all serve other purposes now but i think they are combined with other buildings. Though might also just be private owned water tower the one im thinking of
@@chadoftoons There are water reservoirs for fire protection. Pretty much every village has them but no water towers, at least I haven't seen any. As Grady has mentioned in the video, the towers have their own downsides, like contruction and maintenance cost. If the numbers don't add up, don't build them.
@2:21 Electrons flow from low voltage to high voltage. Since their charge is negative, the electrical current flows from high voltage to low voltage.
127x99mm
Agghhhhhhh.... and this is why I’m not going into electrical engineering. I’m sure I’d get it eventually, but I’ll stick with civil and analyzing beams and trusses.
@Dave Cockayne
Benjamin Franklin getting it wrong is not a problem.
There is a problem when those who have the technology to prove the factual direction refuse to change for the sake of tradition, thereby putting tradition above truth.
There are a great deal of Pharisees in our day and age, they just go by different names.
I was about to say that but then I found this comment. Current flows from high to low voltage. Electron follow the opposite trend, thanks to Benjamin Franklin :D
Let's just refer to it as flowing from strong charge to weak charge.
Gives everyone an understanding of what is going on, and skips the discussion.
Electrons themselves are charged. What kind of charge you talking about? Positive or negative? How does electron flow from charge to charge? I bet "potential" makes much more sense to most people.
"It's been a long time since gravity was knocked offline from a thunderstorm"
Practical Engineering 2018.
I hear the ISS has never been able to keep their gravity online.
@@TonyP9279 I've heard that too, you can tell it drives them mad on board by the way their hair stands on end...
@@TonyP9279 Gravity keeps them orbiting the earth.
ZimZam131 somebody’s gonna get r/woooshed
@@spamlord7570 truth
During a freeze everyone in my small town started running taps to prevent pipe freezing. Then we were alerted the water was unsafe to drink due to bacteria. Now I understand why. Thank you for contributions!
I'm not an engineer and neither work in a related field, however I love watching your videos and learning. Your videos are always delivered in an easy to understand format. Thanks Grady.
hi! i work in the field of water distribution. i actually watched your video for a laugh. but, i was pleasantly surprised by the accuracy and clear explanations. BRAVO! one thing you could have included was the point 43 pound rule. for every foot of height of the tower you gain point 43 pounds of pressure. so a 100 foot tower would passively impart exactly 43 pounds of pressure at ground level.
i subbed. good video.
I agree with this. I missed him saying BAR, PSI or just some weight unit.
That ad hoc "rule" is an example of how bad imperial system of measure is. With pascals/bars and meters you don't need a special constant here, you just use g. So 100 meters tower would produce 9.8 bars of pressure at ground level.
You are missing the unit of area over which the pressure is measured. I assume you mean square inches.
@@gordonrichardson2972 right you are! i should have said PSI
43 X 100 = 4300!
In addition to reducing peak demand from pumps, elevated water tanks also reduce the required size of some water mains since peak flows don't all have to come from the plant at once and provide storage should the water plant go down for a number of hours.
This is a GREAT Video. Well done! It walks you through the basics so anyone can understand why the need. I'm 33yr's in Public Water and sometimes we forget that a lot of people only know that you turn on a faucet. Thank you!
Excellent! My daughter has been asking how the city water tower works and I have been stumbling through with "well, I am not sure, but I think...". Now I know! :D
The Cibolo, TX water tower at 5:00 serves the house that I grew up in.
I pass that tower every weekend. The in-laws live in that neighborhood
You must not be very close to your inlaws, @@MikaelaSelene.
I live there as well off of 1103
The moment when you realize that something so "simple" has so much thought put into it.
Really glad that channels like this and others exist, here you really learn the interesting and useful stuff, not at school sadly : /
Thank you. I just recently joined the Board of Public Affairs and took my first tour of my village's water system. Now that I know the location of things, this video has helped me better understand how it works.
I've been in water treatment and distribution for 24 years. Excellent video 👍👍👍
Can't wait for the pumped-hydro episode you alluded to. It would interesting to know how much water at a given height would be needed to power a home for, say, 24 hours.
I'd be interested in toying with the idea of using consumer-sized water storage tanks to store energy during off-peak hours. This way, you use energy from the grid when it's cheap and then convert that potential energy back into electricity during peak grid hours. I'm assuming that the only reason why we don't do this now is because it's an economy of scale sort of thing.
That's easy to work out. If you know your house uses, say, 30 kWh in a day, that's 108 MJ of energy. That's equivalent to raising 100 metric tons of water (about 110 US tons, or about 26,500 US gallons) to a height of about 110 metres (about 361 feet). However, that's at 100% efficiency, and if it's 80% efficient (good for pumped storage), that means multiplying by 1.25, so 138 metres or 451 feet.
To put that in perspective, a typical 2,000 square foot US house weighs, with its contents, about 205 US tons, so it's the equivalent of lifting the entire house vertically by about 220 feet.
The simple formulas used are to turn kWh into MJ, multiply the former by 3.6. As gravitational potential energy is just mgh where m is the mass in kg, g is the acceleration due to gravity (9.81 m/s^2) and h is the height in metres.
Now take these numbers and multiply them by the number of houses in a large city and you'll see the scale of storage required.
@@jc_1337 The energy storage capacity is trivial for domestic water tanks. Raise 1,000 US gallons of water (which weighs about 4.2 US tons) by 25 feet (that is roughly two storeys), and it will store the equivalent of less than 0.08 kWh of electricity as gravitational potential energy. However, as the whole operation is 80% efficient at best, then you'll only get about 0.06 kWh back.
That's rather less than the electrical energy stored in a 4 Ah 18V battery for a cordless drill (which is around 0.07 kWh).
kept my attention for whole video, very well rounded info and animation! thanks!
Most RUclips videos I watch, I play them minimized in a corner or as I do other things. You videos graphics and clips are so good that I usually watch … actually watch the video.
While living in Taiwan, I had noticed but never thought about why seemingly every building had a water tank on its rooftop. Now I know! Awesome video!
I came here after watching a Water Tower Collapse Compilation.
PiggyDash same
Same 😂😁
Yoooo same 😂
Same!
Same here
That was amazing! An interesting topic, very well explained in a way the average non-engineer can understand - I really enjoyed it. Thanks!
A lot of my family members live in a small city that is known for having a lot of water towers. I never thought about how they worked, mostly at awe at the size of all of them. Now knowing the fundamentals on how they work, it's amazing and genius how the water system works there and in other populations!
As a newly licensed Water Resource Professional Engineer, I approve of this video.
When will clean water run out? Do you know when the water wars will begin?
Wow what were the odds on that?!
who’s here bc of the “water towers falling” vid
Alina Hernandez me
Alina Hernandez me
Alina Hernandez LMAO MEEE
No but now I must search for it... 🤷🏿♂️🤷🏿♂️🤷🏿♂️
Alina Hernandez yo
Note that it doesn't have to be a tower, you can put water tanks at the top of natural hills just as well. I think my town does only this, and due to this the towers continue to look weird to me whenever I see them in other places with no natural hills.
Aqueduct channels were covered with stone lids to prevent contamination. The covers were removed periodically for maintenance.
Dutch people can stop watching after 8:01
it actually a same we don't really use water towers..
Das waar
Er zijn 175 watertorens in Nederland, maar ze hoeven niet heel hoog te zijn (dus ze vallen niet altijd evenveel op) en zijn eigenlijk altijd van steen gemaakt.
Haha I am danish and I was thinking the same :)
@@holthuizenoemoet591 Denmark is just as flat as the netherlands. In my town I know of several big water towers spread around.
RIP boiling water you will be mist
Don't pressure it so much and it will return back to water
@@nicholaslau3194 Actually more pressure will make it easier for the water to become liquid. 😘
ElectroBlud
And if you reduce the pressure on it enough, and let it really cool off, we’ll have really mist that ice cold water.
lame, doesn't make sense, boiling water is steam.
mist is when over saturated gaseous water cools down below the point of nucleation
Justin Koenig
If you’re talking about my bit, I was referring to the triple point, the pressure and temperature when water is in all three states.
Really found the video informative and very easy to understand. Thank you for sharing. Looking forward to the rest of the series that you have planned
Its fascinating remembering that water pressure is entirely dictated by density, gravity, and the height of a fluid column, no matter how big around the column is! So its so cool that we exploit that by raising up a small portion of water to give everything below it the same pressure as if the entire area were submerged below the column. I’ve never thought about that before and its so cool to see the practicality of it!
This need to be implemented in Cities Skylines!
I couldn't stop thinking about that game throughout the video XD
It is, now we need a battery for the hydro power plants xd
Yeah I've been thinking that ever since spike viped placed a bunch of water towers at the bottom of the hill his city sits on
It already has. As secondary water supply though, not as "energy" storage, and shouldn't be placed on polluted grounds haha
They should fix their traffic system first.
Clean, potable, reliable water source is a very underrated blessing of modern civilization.
Why don't all water towers freeze in winter? I know of a story where a small town in Indiana had a water tower that froze one February back in the late 1980's. It collapsed from the water and ice load leaving residents without water for months.
Wow, I’ve never thought about that!
Mom is 74, and she asked, "Hey, how does the city know that when we open our hose, that we need water?" I said, "I bet it has to do with our water tower, and I bet Grady can tell us all about it." Thanks!
This is an excellent video because you methodically walk through the original needs, the solutions, the problems with the solution, and so on. It perfectly motivates the water tower design.
Yes, this video format needs to stick around. I'll chime in and say, though, any chance for some more attention to rural infrastructure? I live in the sticks, and while I understand a good bit (mostly on the electrical side of things, my dad was a lineman when I was a kid), there's still plenty I'd like to see addressed.
"Around 6 AM, people start waking up"
ahahahahahahaha
Maybe YOU dont, but plenty of others do. In my town Rush hour is between 7-8am meaning you have had to get up at 6 to shower, brush teeth, have a shit etc before making your way to work, and in that 1hr alone, over 20,000 vehicles will make their way through the only ONE road out of town if going north (To Bristol where all the jobs are) This means cos of the ONE road, there are massive tailbacks, so some people have to get up even earlier to try and counteract this queue during the morning rush just to make it into work on time.
@@CrazyInWeston Bristol, NY?
@@daveyishere55 Hiya, no Bristol in the UK.
he was talking about people with lives.
I wake up at 3:30 am at least two days a week.
I always wondered what is the purpose of those, and now it makes so much sense. Great video, you earned yourself a new subscriber :)
WOW, it really hit me right at 4:50, that is amazing. It's basically a peaking station, as you would find in a power grid.
Thank you for your efforts, I love investing my time learning new things just like this video. Keep up the good work.
Lol engineering is quite awesome. Btw please do a video on the strength of framed structures vs load bearing structures. I think the former are stronger but I can't find any literature to confirm that.
Great video!
In Montreal we don't see water towers, but the city took advantage of the "mountain" at the center of the city. Reservoirs were dug in the mountain at different elevations to act like water towers.
This illustration gives a great overview of the Montreal water distribution system : ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/PAGE/EAU_FR/MEDIA/DOCUMENTS/stations_pompage_reservoirs_territoire_usines.pdf
I enjoyed that. The level of complexity was comfortable to watch for 10 mins or so.
Practical Engineering is so cool and interesting. Thank you for high value content
When you’re watching this during lockdown at 1AM, that really does hit different
Im watching it at 2am🤣😂
And I at 0015am or is it 1215 am? Im from Germany and this is still confusing about the english time.
@@atariks1475 If you do it in 24 hour format (00:15) you don't need to write AM. If you do it in 12 hour format (12:15am) you need to write AM :)
@@robbiebenka8078 Ahh okay. Thanks alot. Another question. Does everybody in the english world understand the 24 hour format? In school we often got the statement, that many english speaking natives are not familiar with the 24 hour format and can't operate with it. Not because they are dumb or so just because they don't learn it. Was there a change with this?
Just an idea, but you could also have a series for Mechanical Engineering and how mechanical systems work - you could have short videos on how different mechanisms and machines work, and their development over time. JUST AND IDEA :D
hi i just wanna say thank you for making these videos. I recently started a new job as an assistant water operator and your videos helped me. Thank you.
Here in Canada, water towers are disappearing; the one in Lethbridge, Alberta was converted into an elevated restaurant. I would be curious to know what type of technology is replacing them.
@Tubmaster 5000
Booster systems. and frequency variable pumps
a booster system its a small tank usually in the attic. which has a small pump, water from the city comes in, then the small pump in the attic will "boost" the pressure of the water to the required value. so basically its a tiny water tower inside your house. now these come in different shapes and sizes of course, you have booster systems which provide for entire cities or towns, you also have much smaller ones that provide for a single building.
same here in The Netherlands about water towers disappearing. at one point in history we had over 260, only about 170 remain these days, and less then 50 of them are still in use. but this is because building houses with one of those small booster systems became the standard here in i would say the 50's or 60's.
most of the water towers here have also been converted to restaurants or bed and breakfast type places.
@@LodewijkVrije It seems to me that one large tower would be more cost effective than thousands of tiny ones.
@@mouthpiece200 i believe its not actually. here in the NL it costs much more money to maintain our large water towers, then it does to maintain our household booster/boiler systems.
what does an avarage water tower cost to build ? 100.000 dollars? more then that? we just had the entire system in our house replaced for less then 500 dollars.
in the past 20 years we also have not need any inspection or regular maintenance on our in house system. how many times does a water tower need inspection/maintainance over its life time? and how much will that cost over the towers life time?
every house having their own system is way more cost effective, especially when you take into account that you'll probably only have to replace it once in your life time. (the system we had removed had ran for 50 years) now our new system is ready to go for another 50 or so
@@mouthpiece200 A lot of the benefits have solely to do with regulations on disinfection byproducts. In larger tanks, the water 'age' is higher as it's not being cycled through as much. It has time to basically stagnate and form DBPs, then when you exceed these DBPs on mandated testings it requires very expensive public notifications, reviews, engineering consults, and such.
@@RobertMorgan Interesting. But what if I go on vacation? The water in my home tank could be weeks old?
Im 28 years old and never questioned on where my water comes from
Same but I’m 56
minor correction at 2:22: _electric current_ "flows" from high voltage to low voltage. electrons flow in the opposite direction.
Yeah, positive current made of "holes"
That’s wrong. Electrons move from high electric potential to low electric potential. Don’t confuse electronics notation with what actually happens in nature.
Great video. A neighbor of mine built water towers in the area and I never quite frankly understood their purpose. I knew they provided pressurized water, but I did not factor in the timely aspect of their functionality. This simple video provided clarity to something I have always been curious about. Keep up the good work.