 Design of tile drainage pump stations. I guess I've been doing this for a long time, so we have many, many of them in the valley. So what we found with pump stations is we pump in the spring, typically not in the summer. And if we get enough rain in the fall, we pump in the fall. Last fall, there were no tile pumps really running hardly. And those are the two times a year we see them. I've seen tile pump stations running into the first part of November or January, but typically they're done by the middle of November. If there's, if you got rain, if you don't, they don't run at all. But they're necessary. And that's I think the most important time is in the springtime when, when your crop is short and excess water can drown out small crops a lot quicker than they can older crops. So tile drainage, this is the time of the year I think when tile drainage really shines is that is in that time of the year. So you can go online. We have everything I'm going to cover today is in our Tile Drainage Pump Stations for Farm Fields and Extension Bulletin AE1747. I think if you just went on the internet and did a search for NDSU AE7, it'll take you right to it. You can get a download a PDF copy of it. And it covers all of the stuff I'm going to be covering today. The main reason that we need the pump stations is topography and and and outlet conditions. So flat ground, shallow ditches, as I pointed out earlier in the design process. This ditch is full of water here, but most of that water in the ditch came out of that surface runoff culvert there. This is a double pump system, just one running at this time. A lot of times they can program them to alternate unless the flow becomes too great and they can both come on. We had a situation where way back here there's a road. There's a culvert under the road. And if they could load that culvert they could have gravity drain this field. But it costs too much and the county wasn't really willing. So they ended up putting in a lift station and just using the existing drainage. We've had a number of conditions where people tiled into ditches. This is a gravity outflow with a road and guard. The field is on the other side of the truck here. And this is this is six days after a big rain event. And you can see what a water level was. It was up here. And you can just see the flag. And after we drove out there, we walked out in this field in the lower 300 feet of this was still wet six days after the rain event. So the tile is not draining properly. And really needed a lift station in order to handle that excess amount of water. Because the outlet here was backed up so much. It reduced the drainage coefficient significantly. Some additional reasons that we've run into. Some people just want to be able to control when water leaves the field. We live in an area where there's we can get too much rain or we can get not get enough. So you can use this like control. You can use this as for controlling how much when and when the water leaves your field. Like I said, generally, I tell people that by June 15th, you could shut off the pump because you after that you should be done with most of the planting and everything. And and then you could spring and then you could whatever rain you get. If you get a lot of excess rain after that period, you could turn it on. And there was one case some cases where you can gain more grade on laterals by using a my drop in the main. The situation was close to where they could use gravity, but laterals ended up in such a shallow grade they couldn't make it. It had to get too close together. It was just too too. As let's just say it was less expensive to put in lift station and it was then to put in more laterals. So the pump problem areas areas where that can be flooded. A lift pump that's flooded is not doing any good if it's pumped. If water sitting in it because it's just pumping its own water, just recirculating it very near water bodies. We have some situations where these were installed too close to rivers, lakes, etc. And you just get it basically is trying to they're running almost continuously because they're almost trying to empty those. And then we've had some problems where we run into shallow aquifers and sand lenses that contribute to excess water that we can't account for, which is rainfall amounts. So those are some of the problem areas we've run into with lift stations. A typical lift station is is about 13 to 16 feet deep has a base on it. Pump, a lot of ours are submersible, goes out and goes into ditch. Your inflow is usually seven, eight inches. And I'll explain why this is as low as it is. So basic requirements is you got to determine the drainage area, how much how much is actually going to go into it. And if you're going to pay for one of these, and they're not inexpensive, you might want to consider future development where you might be able to use the same lift station for two different sets of field fields. Then you select the location of the pump station. Once you know the area and all that, you can do the pump selection and power requirements and then determine what type of controls you want to purchase or have installed. So let's start with the location. The ideal is near surface drainage outlets, electric service. It limits the pumping distance and the pump size. You don't want to put it too close to the surface drain because you don't want to get flooded. We've had some situations where you get a debate about, do you put it near the electric service or do you put it more where the outlet is? And that is a trade-off on whether you extend electric lines or cost of extending piping. I say 10 years ago, the cost of extending piping would have been more expensive on electric lines, but that's changed. Some electric, rural electrics charge quite a bit to move electric lines, and piping starts to become, can be beneficial. Any other considerations are the potential for vanillism? You want, if you have a large rainfall event and this thing gets hit by lightning or gets knocked out because of lightning or something, then you've got to work on it. You don't want it. You want to be able to get to it and not have to wade to water. And you want it in a stable soil condition where that's why I don't want it too close to a drainage outlet so that it doesn't wash away. And some of the biggest thing is the impact on neighbors. Remember I said that when tile flows, it flows for a long time. So here's the situation in Cass County where they had, well, you can see the drainage lines and they drained it up to here, but the natural place to put the lift station would have been right here because electricity is right near, it was there and it would have been easier, but the water would have flowed past this farmstead and this is not the farmer. So given the long duration flow, you could have ended up with mosquitoes and cattails and just a lot of grief for those people. So this gentleman moved it and put it over here. So there was downstream, so the water's flowing away from the farmstead, not creating those problems. And this is, you can see the farmstead windbreak over here and this is a system put in. The box there is some of our monitoring equipment. This is kind of an ideal situation where you'd like to have it pump right next to the electric lines if you can identify those sites. We have seen sites like this, portable generator. As you can see, this is pretty low. My guess is that when they get a lot of rain, this floods. I don't know if the person moves the generator in and out, but this could be problems. Probably not an ideal installation. We had a gentleman here that created a propane power generator. He didn't have to use electricity. And whenever it called for water, it would turn on the generator and pump water and then shut off. And that was some solutions that people have used when electricity was too far away. It's just another view of it, enclosed it in a shed. It's got a BFD controller on it. So if we talk about sumps, sump construction, difficult casing materials, the sump is just the outside area. It's corrugated metal. Ellington uses a lot of that with a mastic on the outside to keep it from corroding. Prints grow in ADS, so plastic, pre-made plastic ones. And then we have some people that put in their own using concrete sections. I just mentioned the main. The people that use the concrete sometimes put in the main line into the sump found out they had to be sealed very, very well because there were a couple of cases where it kind of washed out and filled up the bottom of the sump with soil, which is hard to get out. And most of these plastic and other ones have a, if you made sumps have sealed bottoms. But you could have concrete down there, or you could have gravel and rocks. At least it's just thick just to keep out the silt and other things. And there's some areas that we found you need to dewater and install in the sump casing. And this is a typical, this is an ADS product sump casing cover on the top reinforced to support the weight of anything that's on top of it. So dewatering, we've had, like I said, you can dewater a Dr. One installer. He said he could dewater with his backhoe, but he was digging in and clay soils where the water flow coming in wasn't where to use the regular trash prompted a lot of contractors use. But when you get on sand, you start digging that hole that just keeps washing gets. And when you're going down 1316 feet, it just starts filling in. And sometimes the best way to do it is to put in a dewatering system, series of small wells around it and pump them out and take out all the water down to the depth you need. We're showing up here. And then do your drainage, do your putting, install it, put it in, and then fill it in. And then you can let it fill up partially with water so it doesn't float out and then let the water table come back up. We've seen this a lot in sandy in areas with a lot of sand. So pump selection need to determine the maximum flow rate. And then the total head, how high do you have to lift that water? And we'll look at some common pump types. So this pump is sold through ADS. It's actually being distributed through a Fargo company here. This is commonly used by, it's supplied by Kerry Pump out of Michigan. Stainless steel submersible that they use to pump water. But what I want to, what you should really understand is that all centrifugal pumps and doesn't, you notice some pumping in your basement is a centrifugal irrigation pumps are mostly all centrifugals. They all have a similar pump curve in that they, the pump manufacturer will put them at a constant speed on them against the constant head that they're pumping against. And then they'll measure the flow rate. And they can develop this pump characteristic curve. So you can see here that if you pump it against 10 feet ahead, it'll pump this flow rate. But if you pump six feet ahead, it'll pump this flow rate, which is much greater. So we can take advantage of that in some with lift stations to a certain extent. And of course, unless you got a lift, there's some, there's some having this kind of ability can sometimes increase your flow rate to keep up with what's flowing into the sump. So, so again, the lift I'm talking about. Can you say what does feet of head mean? Oh, feet of head is the feet of lift. So that's what I'm explaining here is all of these pumps, whether submersible or even the other makes, I'll show they want a minimum submergence depth so that they don't want the water level to go below this because then they start to get vortexing, which can eat up an impeller on a pump or they suck air. So they're not pumping. So they have a minimum of submergence depth. And that's why these things are as deep as they are. So they lift. So if this is your minimum submergence depth and the lift from here to the discharge is your maximum lift or your head. Okay. So I'm using engineering terms. That's your maximum lift in feet. So engineers call that head. And so that when when this pump was running, you would pump down to there. And if you use floats, that's where you shut them off. Because you don't want to get below that. And then when the water level rose so high, you turn them on. And so you go through this up and down. And there's alternatives to this that I'll cover here. But is that good, Hans? Yes. Okay. So what I've seen a lot of installers doing lately is they deangle it down. This serves two purposes. One, it report it reduces the point of discharge. So now your lift is less. So instead of a 10 feet left, once that pipe is full, you may end up with only a seven foot lift. The other thing is is if you're in an area where ditches are full and flooding's taken place and the pump is pumping into it, you may get a lot of nasty phone calls from neighbors who think you're contributing to flooding. So by putting it down like this, when the ditch is full, you can't see it's pumping. And so it kind of reduces the number of nasty calls. So anyway, and that's what I'm showing here is that when you have that situation, and the ditch is full here, now, and the pipe is full, now the maximum lift is as much reduced. And it's as a lift as a water level that you're pumping against. And so that means your pump can move more water. So if you have high flow conditions, when you have these kind of situations, you actually gain something by putting those extensions on. There's a number of companies that make above grade pump stations. In this case, they have a drive shaft going down. You have the impeller down here lifts it up and discharges out. The motor's up here and they got a drive system for the drive shaft. But again, even on these, you look at their technical material, and they want a minimum submergence depth of at least three feet above the impeller. And the other thing about these is the weight of this rests on top of your pump, the sump here. And that, you know, you got to have reinforced systems here, whereas the submersibles will sit on the bottom here. So in this situation, again, you have your maximum left would be up to here. That's the point of discharge. And this gentleman has this is a drive made out of in Wilmer, Minnesota. And the motors right here, they got a drive system here, you can actually change sprockets, so you could change you can have two speeds with these. And then he's just tacked on some, some dreatile here to put it down lower into the ditch. Also reduces the amount of erosion from the discharging water. This manufacturer Ranger pumps out a Vesta Minnesota. And they have a direct drive electric drive to theirs. And there's a design more to handle. Excuse me, trash. The impeller they use is more like an auger flake in a way. So if you've got surface inlets out in that cornfield, and you get pieces of corn into the tile get washed down, this pump will move them. The submersibles will not they don't handle trash very well. They might handle some silt, but they won't handle trash. That can be a problem. And because the weight of this sets on top of the sump, sometimes they, in this case, they put in a reinforcement so that the weight didn't push down so hard on the plastic and start to collapse it. So what are these things cost? Last I checked, the pumps can cost anywhere from 3 to 7,000. And then in addition to that, you got the sump construction and installation costs. That might add up to 15 to $20,000 for one lift station. And that doesn't take no account if you got got a pay to have the electricity move to that site. Last I heard sometimes a single phase power can cost $30,000 a mile or even more depending on where you're at. And also if dewatering is needed so that these could end up be a sizable investment. And that's why I said at the beginning to look to make sure that if you're going to build one of these that there might be some other fields that you could put into it to handle with a second pump. Pumping costs from what I've been able to, we have one great cooperator Hans and I have worked with over the years up in Grigler, Minnesota area. In 2010 that rain here he at his farm he measured 37.34.7 inches of rain over the growing season. And at that time he had 5000 acres little over 5000 acres in lift stations, 25 electric meters. Some of them were some of the pumps are on two meters on one meter. You have more than one pump on one meter. And his total electric bill for the whole year was saying that he pumped 34 that much water. I'm just saying that that was what was it 12 13 inches above average, would you say, Hans? I think for the growing season, but probably his his electric bill, he shared with me a spreadsheet is $30,000. So the average for the whole 5000 acres was about six bucks an acre for the year is pumping costs. And like you told me, he thought his meter charges were greater than that. So it's not like you need a lot of energy to move this water, but when you need it, you need it. Of course, he had some smaller fields where the costs were a little bit higher. And I talked to a farmer by Barnsville, who without me even prompting told me that that was about what his energy pumping cost was about six bucks and average an acre. So Tom, the question is, what about solar or options? Okay. Solar. It's a good question. I always get that. And there is a Josh Johnson here with Jemco is going to be installing this spring, a solar powered system as a test system. And there's a company, I think the young guys out of Minnesota, I haven't been there. I just sharing information that Josh shared with me that he's selling solar panels or power these, but we don't have any real information how well they perform. At this time, what's definitely people are looking at the definite option. It would probably work a lot better for smaller fields or targeted drainage where you might have a like I showed my in one of my slides that there was a 200 acre field, but only 45 acres have been tiled. You got lift pump on something like that. Solar powered system might work just fine. Flow isn't that great. So good question. I think I showed that some people are using propane in some of theirs and some are using portable electric generators. I'm going to skip over this. The pump horsepower. If you put a sump down in there. A lot of our electric utilities don't like a single phase pump single phase motor. That's more than 10 horsepower. And the reason is that the operating current when they start up is the in rush current is about six to seven times greater than its normal operating current. Well, if you're at the end of a line and near a farmstead, that could actually create when that pump turned on, it could create some brawn out situations on nearby because of the current draw. So they'd like to limit it to 10 horsepower. And that's why these are shaded. So just looking at it. Say you have 10 feet of total head you're pumping against. And you're moving 1000 gallons a minute use you the 10 horse. But what if you have what if you had 700 gallons a minute? Well, you could buy a five horse would probably work just fine. And I've seen a lot of them. I think that's the upper limit of the of a five horse. So that's kind of what that's the blue areas for single phase pumps. If you are got a higher head or you got a higher flow rate, you're tiling more acres and need 20 horses. I've seen some people go to two 10s and have them the 10 would operate most of the time. But if the flow came in really high, then they would turn on the other 10. That way they aren't turning on at the same time, things like that. So I talk about fixed speed pumps, just like to some pump in your basement is fixed speed, which means when you turn it on, it comes up to full RPMs and stays there until the float goes down and then it shuts off. These were used a lot in the early days. But because they pump at full speed, they pump a lot of water. So you need some storage volume with them, which is dependent on the maximum inflow rate, which is you're not determined by your drainage coefficient. So desired pump cycle time, that's the time the pump is on, plus the time it's off. Manufacturers tell me that they think their pumps can handle up to 10 cycles per hour, which means that the pump could go on and off over a six minute period and turn back on again. But we actually measured one site where it was pumping 18 cycles per hour, which on and off, that's really hard on motors. And it turns out that the maximum pump cycles occurs when the tile inflow rate is half of the design of the pump flow rate, what the design pump will move. So I say you got a pump that moves 700 gallons a minute, the maximum pump cycles would happen at 350 gallons a minute. This is an old style system, you got your floats here, pump down here, you can see water coming in. And the water gets up to here, the pump turns on when it gets down to here, it shuts off. And I almost like us on pumping your house. So you got a certain amount of storage depth that you need because you need this for minimum submergence, you got your maximum lift. So how much do you need? It's a simple equation. Just to show you drainage coefficient three eighths of an inch, 10 cycles per hour. You need 1.4 cubic feet. Yeah, you need 1.4 cubic feet per per acre of storage. So if you had 100 acre field, that'd be 148 140 cubic feet, which is approximately 1000 gallons of storage so that this it didn't cycle too often. And so in the early days, going back to 1940s, when they designed some of these pump stations, they had these big vertical storages be poured concrete and pumping to be sitting up here and they'd have a pump house on top of it. But for farm fields, this is not desirable. What a lot of people went to is they got the small diameter riser and then they got two foot diameter horizontal storage underneath. So just to give you an example, if you were draining 120 acres, you need a with three eighths and drainage coefficient and 10 cycles per hour three foot on and off, which is not unusual. You needed nine foot diameter sump. Well, that's pretty hard. You know, that can involve some real construction to install something that big in diameter and a deep hole. And this is one of the few I've seen. This is eight foot diameter sump that was installed here. Close to 3.2 feet apart. We checked the storage is 1200 gallons. What a lot of farmers went to is for that same design with a four foot diameter sump. 120 acres. You need 44 feet of two foot diameter storage and your tile goes into that. This can be handled and dug in pretty easily. So more and more, we've seen people go to this type of storage. It's buried. It's easier to install and still provides the amount of storage that you need for your pump. This one might look like if you had it out in the field. I put this picture in there because we found that if this is too long, it gets out to 7080 feet. And that pump turns on the time it takes for the water to get from here down to there. And there is a delay time. By the time it got down there, the pump shut off because it already pumped out too much. So what people started doing was putting a tee here and they'd run say 20, 30 feet this way, 20, 30 feet this way, 20, 30 feet this way. And then they had it all right close and then then it would all drain faster because if you get too long a drainage pipe, then it takes too long for the water to travel down there. And it's sitting in here. So here's a concrete reinforced top and he's got 70 feet of dual of two foot diameter dual wall pipe buried underneath that provides the storage needs for this pump unit. Well, about, I got seven years on this, but it's actually about in about nine years, variable frequency motor controllers came in. The nice thing about these is they had expense, but they can take either single or three phase power. You can use three phase motors, which there's less wear on the motor, three phases better than single phase, tolerates more frequent starts. It's got three phases soft start options, but you have to control the speed of the pump of the motor. And to do that, they use a feedback water level sensor that feeds back through the circuitry to control the speed of the pump. So it's in effect, what these VFDs do is the water coming out of the discharge from the pump is almost exactly the same as the amount of water flowing into the sump, but less storage is required in fixed speed. So typical VFD, you have your power coming in, you have a water level sensor here that's sensing the water level that you want to maintain in here. And then this, the VFD controls the pump, controls the speed of the pump so that it matches the inflow. I'm going to skip over that. So I did some testing with Jim Co here in Fargo on their VFDs and they had 12 foot, they had a test setup where they had 12 foot left and we're measuring the flow rate. So at 60 hertz, which is what comes out of your line, the five horsepower pump would pump a little over 600 gallons a minute, this is against 12 feet ahead. By the way, 10, this would be higher. 55, you can see as it goes down. And then the 10 horsepower pump would pump almost 1,400 gallons a minute. Now one of the things that they don't like to see is that when you get down around 40 hertz, that's about as low as they want to go with these VFDs. So then when the flow rate coming into the sump drops that low, then they go into an on-off situation almost like a float pump. And so they, but they had that saw start option so they can ramp up slowly and pump and then shut down. So you still need a certain when they go into that low flow condition, you still need some storage but not near enough. And I see in some situations, sometimes they use the main depending on the installation as part of the storage. So this was when we put in a big iron in 2011. That's the VFD that that Ellingson put this in that they put in. The early ones of these VFDs were not very good handling our winters, but the modern ones, you can leave this out all year and you don't have to worry about the LCD display or whatever. Most of them now can take the weather. And this is the water level sensor. It pressure sensors up here. This is just two inch PVC pipe that goes down in there. And as the water level rises it pushes, it compresses the air column and pressure sensor senses it and then controls the pump through that. Pretty simple system. They can get waterlog, but all you need to do is pull them up, fill them back up with air and shove them back down and then they're good to go again. Just tin covering for fire protection. When water does come out of these, it can create erosion problem. This gentleman put a concrete slab there. I noticed that I drove by here last fall and he's now on the end of those two pipes. He's actually got drops that come down and drop down to the top of this. So pump manufacturers that we've seen here in the Red River Valley is carry manufacturing out of Michigan. And I think you can do a search on carry pumps and you find them. JMD manufacturing on a Wilmer. They're the ones that make that yellow pump with the motor up on top. Ranger pumps, as I mentioned, they're out of Vesta. Jemco, Maxair. They're here in Fargo and they're making the pumps for that sold through ADS. And years ago I saw some Parma pumps, but I haven't seen any for several years.