A way of getting the water to the top of the tall building without electricity?

Question

First, let me explain the situation. Post-apocalypse setting, a group of humans (let's say around a hundred of them) have to find safe places to live at, protected from animals, bandits, and other menaces. They decided on a group of tall buildings (as in the picture), between 12 and 18 stories high. They live on top of them, last few floors. It provides safety, overlook of the surroundings.

Now, the city is ruined so there is no running water in the waterworks, but, there is a strong spring and a well in between the buildings. There is no city wide electrical grid, and they use generators (but rarely due to fuel consumption) and solar panels, but those are usually spent on lights, preparing food, refrigerators, etc.

Idea is that on the top of the building they have greenhouses to grow veggies for their use. But, veggies and greenhouses need water. And I don't think that rainwater is enough, even if collected for that purpose.

So, the question is, how to get the water from the spring or the well to the top of the building, where, for example, could be a big water reservoir? Or is it somehow possible to hook and reconnect the water pipes of the buildings to the spring instead of city waterworks and get it directly to the faucets?

Several members of the population living there have some knowledge in engineering and construction, theoretical and practical, so it can be done if it doesn't include some ultra complicated work that require some special machinery or conditions.

Is it possible at all without electricity and pumps? If not, I am open to all kinds of suggestions!

Answer 1

In order to get water up to the top of a building, you can either carry it manually, or you can pump it. Pumps don't have to run on electricity.

Wind-powered pumps use a windmill to power the pump, and have been used since at least the 1500s (and likely much earlier) for irrigation and other purposes.

Other options like steam power, diesel, or water wheels could also work.

Another option would be to use a hydraulic ram pump, which uses the inertia of the water itself to pump part of the water up.

Answer 2

The oldest pump in historical records is the force pump. The book that first describes it was written between 15 and 30 B.C/B.C.E.

This is the Archimedes's screw, which is one of my favorite ancient machines. It was used for irrigation. These could be arranged within a building's staircases.

And then there is always the classical bucketwheel.

All of the machines above were operated by human power, but with some clever tech'ing around post-apocalypse survivors could make animal, wind, steam or coal based versions as well.

Edit: there are some great comments here, so I'm adding them to the answer :)

To clarify... the force pump is nothing but an alternate name for the hand piston pump seen all over "pre-electricity" England and America. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piston_pump

And if you've scrounged a bicycle, you can connect the rear sprocket to the pump. The Google search "bicycle powered water pump" is rife with examples.

-RonJohn

And

Bucketwheels have an advantage in that if you place them in a suitable location you can power your bucketwheel with a waterwheel. Couple that with a nice storage system and you've got pressurised water at no extra labour cost.

-Joe Bloggs

Answer 3

Steam it up with a solar concentrator.

This London skyscraper can melt cars and set buildings on fire

The building — designed by internationally renowned architect Rafael Viñoly — is a dramatic edifice with curved exterior walls. Built at 20 Fenchurch Street in London's financial center, the 38-story skyscraper is known locally as "the Walkie-Talkie" for its unusual shape.

But that curvilinear shape is exactly what's causing the problem: The south-facing exterior wall is covered in reflective glass, and because it's concave, it focuses the sun's rays onto a small area, not unlike the way a magnifying glass directs sunbeams onto a superhot pinpoint of light.

So too the buildings of your people. They have affixed mirrors such that in the middle of the day, the suns rays are reflected from the buildings onto a boiler below. This boiler at ground level has been filled by the spring, and when heated to boiling, the steam moves up the building's internal standpipe to the rooftop, where it is condensed in a radiator.

The cool thing about this is that it would be disclosed early in the story as a utilitarian way for these survivors to use what they have to move water. But what they actually have is an Archimedes Heat Ray which I am sure they will find use for as the story unfolds.

Answer 4

All these answers are boring and practical. I see no hard-science tag... Where's the fun in reusing well-established methods that are basically guaranteed to work quite well?

Find the materials (somewhere, somehow) to make a giant tarp and cast it across the 6 buildings. Put a post in the middle that goes to the ground so that the middle of the tarp is raised. This creates a much larger rain-catcher than just the one building. If the buildings are really oriented as in your picture (I realise they may not be), You should get three of the 6 buildings receiving rainwater.

Also, getchou some bridges between your buildings. That would be cool.

Answer 5

A standard manually operated high-lift water pump can pump water 45 metres or more (your target building is 42-63 metres).

The height to which a hand pump will lift is governed by the ability of the pump and the operator to lift the weight in the delivery pipe. Thus the same pump and operator will be able to achieve a greater lift with a smaller diameter pipe than they could with a larger diameter pipe.

Assuming a water source at ground level and a vertical pipe 45 metres by 7 cm diameter, that is 173.2 L (or kilograms) of water when the pipe is full. This is well within the ability of some adults to lift on their own, and definitely within the ability of two or more operating the pump handle.

A series of storage tanks and pumps constructed on lower floors could break up the pumping process into stages, making each stage easier.

Answer 6

The people living on the top floors can power the pump as they travel down, by lift/rope. Let gravity work for you.

Obviously this doesn't bring up enough water, but can be used along with better solutions. We had such a setup in one summer camp and the kids would happily run up and go down over and over again :-)

Answer 7

One way of pumping water without needing any external energy source, other than the water itself, is a hydraulic ram.

It wastes water since it only pumps a fraction of the water that is made available to it but it can keep pumping without the need for any wind, solar energy, animal muscle, human sweat, etc.

Answer 8

I hesitate to mention this, being so simple, but since tall buildings already often have a large water tank on the roof (an estimated 15,000 in NYC) and an electric pump at ground level to get water up to it, could your people not simply run that pump for the limited length of time it takes to top it off each day?

Running the pump would give you something productive to do with any solar electricity not otherwise needed during the day.

Also, in ANY scheme, according to this white paper, the top 6 floors would not have the current water pressure, since the tank isn't high enough above them to provide it by gravity, so although the water would flow, there would be less pressure than previously. This would, ironically, pose a problem for water-saving shower heads.

If the water tank is sized to provide for the needs of the the whole building full of people, it could last several days supplying the needs of a fraction that number, especially since they'd initiate water-saving measures while under siege.

Note that this whole answer doesn't really apply in Europe, where rooftop water tanks are rarely used.

Answer 9

Where you use water, there you get waste water. You need to supply fresh water up, and you need to get waste water down. The amount of both will be roughly the same.

Now combine the two: Use a long rope, hang it over a pulley at the top of the building, and attach two large water containers to it, a blue one for fresh water, and a brown one for waste water. Use is as follows:

1. You fill the blue tank at the bottom of the building with fresh water.

2. You fill the brown tank at the top with waste water.

3. Both tanks are almost perfectly balanced, a single man can now move a ton of waste water down while moving a ton of fresh water up.

4. Empty the blue tank at the top into a fresh water basin.

5. Empty the brown tank at the bottom into a sewer.

6. Move the two tanks back into their starting position, rinse and repeat.

The order of the steps is somewhat important, otherwise this is as simple a solution as it gets. Should be quite easy to implement in your post apocalyptic world, it allows you to move large amounts of water quickly with very little effort, and it does not require any energy use or complicated setup.

Bonus points if the point where you load the fresh water is significantly higher (strong well has some pressure that allows the water to rise a floor or two above the ground) than the point where you dump the waste water (think cracked sewer next to the building). This would allow your protagonists to distribute flowing water throughout a few floors at the top of the building. Any floor between the waste water tank and the fresh water basin can have fresh water delivered and waste water removed by gravity.

More bonus points, if you also collect some rain water at the top of the building. With that you can ensure that you have always more waste water that goes down than fresh water that goes up. Consequently, you won't have to move the water yourself, you just need to apply some brake on the rope/pulley to avoid the tanks becoming too fast. Gravity will do the work for you.

Finally, as Peter Cordes points out in a comment, there is also the possibility to use two pulleys, one on each side of the building. This has several advantages: First, it would provide for a better separation of fresh and waste water, second, it would provide the operators with a convenient horizontal rope piece that can be grabbed to move the tanks, and third, it would make anchoring of the pulleys much easier. The simplest solution would be to just place a long, strong beam across the roof of the building, and fix the two pulleys at either end. Since the forces on both sides are almost perfectly equal, you would not even need to anchor the beam at all. A little more involved solution could look similar to this:

              v rope carrying tanks v
        o---------------------------------o
        |\---------------+---------------/|
        | \ ^ support ^ / \  ^ rope ^   / |
        |  \           /   \           /  |
        |   \         /     \         /   |
        |    \_______/_______\_______/    |
        |     ######## roof  ########     |
        |     #######################     |
        v     #######################     v
      fresh   #######################   waste
      water   #######################   water
      tank    #######################   tank

If the four diagonal beams are held in a 45° position by the support rope and each other, there will be no bending forces on the structure whatsoever, and the anchoring will be next to trivial.

Answer 10

Let me draw you a picture. Two pictures. And an equal sign.

Aermotor has been making these things since 1888, and they're hardly the first manufacturer. I don't know how many folks have lived in rural areas, but 180' is not that deep for a well. You can also see the windmill atop the building catching nice wind, to say nothing of wind gradient effects which already slow wind near the ground.

Answer 11

An Archimedes' screw, or a series of them at different floors.

The device consists of a helical surface surrounding a cylindrical shaft, which in turn is placed inside a hollow tube. Rotating the helical surface (the screw part) or rotating the entire tube (if the helical surface is attached to the tube) will transport water up.

Said device can transport water so long as there is sufficient power to turn the screw against the weight of the water and the device itself, with longer screws obviously weighing more, as well as carrying more water.

Ancient versions were powered by hand, or even by foot. It would be fairly simple to rig them to a wind powered turbine. It has also been used as conveyors for particulate matter, such as grains.

Answer 12

Are there any hills nearby that are taller than the buildings?

If so, build a reservoir at a higher altitude than the top of the buildings, connected via pipes to water tanks on the tops of the buildings, such that water from the reservoir flows downhill under gravity, and then up the buildings into the tanks.

Obviously, the reservoir will need some additional altitude to overcome losses in the process (e.g. leaks, restrictions in flow, etc).

Answer 13

For something that should be within the bounds of simply modern engineering I would suggest a water tower and wind pump. A water tower stores water above ground at a sufficient height to produce pressure (by way of gravity); this water pressure is typically fed into water pipes to force it up through sinks and other systems in our buildings.

This of course still requires some way to get water into your water tower: wind pumps are simple wind turned pumps that pull water from some source (river, spring, or lake) and pump it else where (historically a lot of irrigation and draining). Their imagery is often associated with old farms.

Answer 14

This is a little crude, in more ways than one.  Perhaps somebody can suggest improvements to (cough cough) clean it up.

First of all, they’ll want to have a reservoir (or cistern) at (or, more likely, below) ground level.  This would allow them to capture and hold spring water temporarily, in case the spring and/or the pumping mechanism have varying flow rates.  (I’ll get back to that.)  If they’re collecting rainwater at ground level, they’re probably already doing this.

As in initial capability, immediately after the apocalypse (or maybe even before), this could be as simple as a pond around the spring.  Given time to establish some infrastructure, there should probably be such a cistern in each building; this provides some security against bandits/raiders.  Rig something so that the water from the spring runs through pipes or other channels into the holding tanks in the basements of the buildings.  (Try to make it hard for attackers to slip poison into the reservoirs.)

One added security measure is “security through obscurity” — after you have built a plumbing system that pipes the spring water into the buildings, bury it.  This may make it somewhat harder for adversaries to steal your water or tamper with the system.  Ideally, it will make the spring invisible.

The question of getting the water to the upper floors remains.  Renan suggested a “bucketwheel”:

but handwaved the power source.  (For the record, I thought of this before I read the answers.)  If there’s power to spare, there are many options.  But the question said that all the solar power is accounted for, and that fuel (for the generators) is scarce, and I assume that the building complex isn’t within walking distance of a forest, a coal mine, or an oil well.  If the spring provides enough power to drive the bucketwheel (or bucket conveyor belt) and lift water 18 stories, that’s great, but that strikes me as unlikely.

One idea that hasn’t been mentioned is to have a dual-track bucket conveyor belt.  One track would bring water up; the other would take waste material down, and thus provide the power to drive the belt and lift the water.  I am thinking specifically of toilet-type waste.  There might be others, but I imagine that these survivors would recycle as much as possible.

The rate of disposal of waste varies with the time of day.  This is why it’s important to collect the spring water all the time, so the water that emerges from the spring overnight, and at other periods of low waste-disposal activity, doesn’t just go into the ground.

Of course, if they’re using washing water, urine and feces in their gardens, this won’t work.

Answer 15

A method might be a modified, large solar still.

Basically you have the sun heat up a pool of water, where it rises to a place where it can condense back into water.

It's often used as a way to purify water, but in your case, you can use it to raise the water up:

You could use a parabolic reflector to concentrate sunlight, to heat water in the base at ground level:

With enough energy, you can create a steam pipe that will raise the water up to the top of your buildings. Then, have a place where it cools, and you have water.

Answer 16

Possible without pumps? Not really. A "pump" is just a device that adds energy to water, letting it flow against gravity; however, electricity is just a convenient way of moving energy around quickly, and humanity has been using pumps long before the invention of electricity. Here's a page about various methods the romans used for lifting water for their aqueduct system. Additionally, most modern water pumps (that might be left over salvage in a post-apocalyptic scenario) can be separated from their electrical motors and driven with a rotating shaft that gets it's power from anywhere.

The question you'll have to address is not so much "Can water be lifted without electricity", but "Where does the energy come from to lift all this water?" Since you say that there's not enough leftover energy from generators and solar panels to do this work, we can look to other methods of harnessing energy that might be available.

Since your society is already living high-up, and since they might not have the food/space to support beasts of burden to turn cranks all day, I think an obvious solution is wind power. A set of windmills on the roofs, and maybe even attached to the sides, could provide a ton of usable energy. This could be used to drive mechanical processes all through the building, with the most advanced technology being gear boxes and crankshafts. They could even be used to turn a generator; probably not fast enough to use the energy directly, but it could be stored in salvaged batteries for later use.

As additional food for thought, pumping water up to high places is a form of energy storage itself (still used today). Maybe your society uses wind power to slowly pump water to the top of the building, and then when the wind is dead, the water can flow back down through some water turbines to generate electricity that way. There're lots of ways to access and store energy in the world around us!

Answer 17

i would point out some tecnical design: vacuum pump can go up to 10.3meters, then you would need to fill a pond and from here start again. A positive pressure pump can do much more, 100 psi (7 bar) is enough to get you over 70 meters, at which case you just install another pump for your next 70 meters.

Please note if you attach your implant directly to the tube the pressure can be pretty high; the safe solution is the pump filling a non-ermetic container close to your applicance, where the pressure will drop to normal atosfere, and normal gravity is used.

Those tall building prbably have lift: even witout power, those thing can be relatively easily moved by hand, as they have counterweight, so that, even if manually operated, would be your main way to carry water and other stuff in your top floors.

Answer 18

I love how no one said: The use a very tall pipe.

Let me introduce you to artesian well. You take water rich enviroment, put one end of pipe in it and water appear on other end.

And for those who say: but the pressure won't push water up to the top. I say: you are terrible picky for someone living in post-apocalyptic environment. If poor Mugabe can take 20 kilometres walk for water right now you can take a few steps to the terrace with water for plants.

Also I'm all in for the fact that this is terrible design for defence. Much better are to reuse some medieval castles that were build for siege, with water resource that couldn't be poisoned.

Answer 19

How about passive rain / fog collectors at the top of the buildings? Unless your post-apocalyptic city is Las Vegas... Fog collectors are large permeable fabric panels that intercept the flow of fog-filled wind on hilltops and ridgelines, and collect hundreds to thousands of liters of water per night. Fog collectors have been erected in Namibia and Peru to provide water for personal needs, cooking, and agriculture.

Answer 20

For the plants aeroponics could be used, using light pipes and shade-tolerant plants near windows initially, where the water supply would be via capillary action in an artificial supply of roots. Ropes would be sent into the ground, to gradually branch out into ever finer capillaries leading to every individual plant. Capillary action will raise to tree top height.

Answer 21

If "there is a strong spring and a well in between the buildings", it would already be integrated into the municipal water supply. Ignoring such a resource is as silly now as it would be post apocalypse.

Close any valves exiting the neighborhood.

Work with resources already in place. Running any kind of new infrastructure 12-18 floors without power is more work than its worth. It would be very convenient(and plausible) if the tallest building were still under construction allowing crane access and heavy equipment on site.

Windmills on the ground are enough to simulate a low pressure municipal supply to each building which will serve the lower 2-3 floors. But above that, the buildings will rely on either pressure booster pumps or transfer pumps to a roof tank. The electric motors in these pumps can be removed and the pump portion powered by some alternative source. Unfortunately, getting the power source to the pump location can be a very large problem.

With the tallest building still under construction, a wind turbine could be raised by crane and placed on an unenclosed floor inside the building. That windmill power would lift water to a simple tank built on the roof or upper floor. The tank could be tied to the building's standpipe. Then all the standpipes could be linked with firehose at street level. Because water seeks its level, it will rise to the top of each standpipe in every building. The existing plumbing on living floors only would be tied into the standpipe. This would prevent an inadvertently opened faucet in an unoccupied room from draining the system.

If there are ever problems, a pumper firetruck could always be used to quickly inject lots of volume into the system.

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/plumbing14.pdf

An different solution I thought of is to use the elevator to lift containers of water or whatever else you need. The elevator motor wont work, but the counterweight is still attached to the cable. If you could attach additional weight(buckets or tanks) to the counterweight at a high floor while the elevator car is at ground level, that would allow the elevator to rise without power. Unload the weight at the bottom and the elevator car comes back down.

You don't want to carry weight up the stairs just to drop it down the elevator, so what do humans living on upper floors produce which weighs a lot, and which they want far away from where they live? ... sewage. Yes, I just proposed a human waste powered elevator on a question that asked nothing of the kind. I should get out more.

Answer 22

Steam Engine

Before there was electricity there was steam. Steam engines are fairly basic machines. Further our current society has plenty of refined metal that could be used as the basis for redeveloping this technology. Assumably you could just burn wood in place of coal. This option would likely not provide as much power but it is viable. Finally, the steam engine could be mounted two or three floors up for defence -- you would have to rely on animal / human power to position the fuel.

Note that there are forests near cities. The green areas in the map below area parks often dominated by forests (the map is of the Cleveland Ohio metropolitan area):

Answer 23

Since we're including impractical answers, behold my favorite weird way to raise water: the fluidyne pump. It's a heat engine closely related to the more familiar Stirling engine. Fluidynes can be powered by sunlight, but you'll need a lot of them in series to reach the top of a tall building.

Answer 24

A windmill may not produce enough "power" to work a pump depending on location, how much wind is blocked or scattered by building, and it might get scavenged for its materials by raiders so wind may not be the most reliable way to get stuff working(depending on the setting)

I'm assuming the survivors will need to wander off into farming as well to be able to eat, and as humans are lazy, they will use mules/horses/cows to till the soil(even if the soil is inside a building with a glass roof or mirrors set up)

Now if you'd occasionally hook those cows and mules up to a water pump the settlers built out of wood or metal if they have proper metal working tools available for the water crisis sets in.

http://users.tpg.com.au/wagnerbe/hpv/html/horse_drawn_pump.html

and have those pumps pump the water up to a big water tank, which is relatively easy to build out of wood, you only need your work animals to work once in every x days until the water runs out. That way you can get the animals out of harms way and "hide" the pump for marouders. You could even dig it in the ground and then cover it up.

These animals could also be used to automate washing for the people living there https://youtu.be/6tMoE8siNo8?t=5m54s

and of course power grinding stone for grinding grains and other materials.

They can also used to power machinery with leather belts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_shaft

or generate electricity with it. Small amounts, but perhaps enough to help with building up an electrical grid up with windmills/watermills etc...

Basically, by first utilizing animals, they could short circuit the industrial revolution within a few years if they manage their resources correctly and focus on getting power from windmills/water mills as soon as possible on large scale.

When there's power, water, electric light, they can grow crops galore, which they can trade with other settlements and get an economy back up and running. They can smelt metals with electricity and get iron working back up and running.

Answer 25

Perhaps this is a novel solution, but you could use a space pump.

Simply build a tube--like a chimney--to the top of your building. At the top of your building, the chimney opens out into a dome, perhaps with a glass surface.

On this top level, you have a bunch of soil and plants, because that is nice and aesthetically pleasing.

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At the bottom of the tube, you have a nuclear reactor and a water reservoir that allows water to fall towards the reactor. The nuclear reactor vaporizes the water passing over it, which is used to power a turbine (much like the turbine of a jet engine) at the bottom of your tube (providing energy).

This steam then expands and flows up your tube to warm the jungle at the top of your tower, and condense on the dome.

As the water condenses and filters through your jungle/farm, it flows back down to the nuclear reactor.

---

Bear in mind, this nuclear reactor could also power a plasma that is almost energy neutral (as in a tokamak--so it is basically free) ejecting near-massless particles at significant fractions of the speed of light out the bottom of your building, providing nearly 1g of thrust for your inhabitants.

---

Further, once you get up to speed, the blue shift of the stars in front of your space pump will produce enough light to stimulate photosynthesis in your jungle (at the top of your building)...and voila, you have an interstellar space pump that not only transports water, but also grows food for you to eat and moves you around.

Answer 26

You could probably build an economy around water carriers. They could walk up the stairs all day with the water, for a fee.

Answer 27

Some answers are wrong, it is not possible to pump water from above, if the height is higher somewhat like 10 meters (10 meters of water is 1 atm of pressure), over 10 meters you can drain water only if there is some pressure underground.

However you could have some series of pumps each one draining a well that is 5 meters below.

1. Pump 1 get water from ground level and push it to a 5 meters tank,
2. Pump 2 get water from the 5 meters tank and pull it to the the second tank at 10 meters etc.
3. And so on.

If the height is particular high, another feasible way is a mobile tank, it is filled at ground level with few hundred liters, then it is pulled to the roof (by hand in example).

Answer 28

What is the nature of the apocalypse your world was subjected to? Assuming this world evolved from our timeline, it will have experienced global warming. If that's the case: let the water come to you. At the tops of at least some of these abandoned buildings are former swimming pools, which are kept filled with freshwater by regular heavy rains and serve as large reservoirs for the inahbitants. The rains also irrigate the building-top gardens, mitigating the need for pumping technology.

Answer 29

I might be thinking too simply on this but why not use a dumbwaiter run by the people in the towers. being enclosed the cable and pulley system should be protected against bandits and as long as someone can pull a rope or cable you have a way up and down.

Answer 30

Brief history. Over 80 years ago, a Moldavian boyar brought from a western country (Germany, France) dpua pumps that he used to remove water from the fountain to the mansion and the water lifting field.

Description of the pump: it was made up of a cylindrical body with semispherical lids (everything made of cast iron), one of the parts had a pipe (the inlet) that was above the level of the fountain and had the end provided with a r1 tap and above palnie (p). from the other end of the body there was another pipe (slightly) bent at the end and fitted with a r2 tap. More about drilling water well here.

installation: the pump body was immersed in the well until the bottom, and the two pipes - the inlet and the discharge - stayed above the guides (the upper edge) of the well.

operating mode: 1. Open the drain cock r2 as well as the intake faucet r1. 2. pour the bucket water through the pallets filling the entire system until the water flows through the r2 tap. 3. Close the taps r1 and r2, then open the robot r2 and the water starts flowing smoothly without having a large flow. as a rule the water was flowing in the well of the fountain because the springs were strong.

If the r1 faucet opened, the system would be defused and the water would not flow through the r2. The pump that was installed in the field raises the water to the pools for the preparation of the spraying solutions.

What a "diabolic" mind had that engineer from recent times gone! it is worth mentioning that two unofficial commissions from the polytechnics in Iasi and Bucharest were asked to address the issue, and they were brought by a clever director from an i.a.s. nearby. unfortunately, the pope had disappeared, because some villagers could no longer feed the cattle, feeling the taste of oxides in the water.

The description belongs to people who are trustworthy.

Answer 31

How about a no-moving-parts solution? Do it like trees do, with capillary action. Trees manage to lift water from the ground all the way to their tops this way. The leaves evaporate the water, which causes a suction pressure which pulls more water from cells below. Trees are a constant elevator of water.

I can imagine a long rope of some hydrophilic material sucking water out of a reservoir and distributing it up the rope through capillary action. At the top, you spread it out fan-like, and dehumidify it. Collect the water, and the now-drier material will begin to pull more from below. Repeat as needed.

The 'rope' could be an engineered material consisting of thousands of tubules or other structure that maximizes the amount of water to be exchanged.