RECOLLECTIONS OF POWER AND IRRIGATION
My paternal grandfather must have been a crackerjack
engineer.
Back when not too many homes in the Midwest country had
electrical
power, he installed a 32 V. DC Diesel generator in a
garden-house
and had the big house wired (the old 'knob & tube' style up
in the
attic). The wall outlets were like lamp sockets and for
years the
lamp cords had screw-plugs. Adapters were used for the more
recent
two-prong plugs. The 32 V system ran for years, perhaps 1928
or so,
as I can distinctly remember the generator going "poom-poom-poom"
down in the garden house. Eventually my father arranged for
an AC
power line from town, initially 440 V and not too reliable,
but
it permitted installation of a GE Monitortop Fridge and the
icebox
went to the back porch for backup. Once I found a box of the
old
32 V light bulbs in the barn and had some fun putting them
into
lamps, to go off like flashbulbs. They would be worth
something
now.
Grandfather also decided to fight the typical Kansas dry
summers
by installing irrigation plumbing throughout the six or
seven
acres of grounds and gardens, for which he put in a
hydraulic-ram
pump down at the river dam and a big elevated
storage/pressure tank
next to the servant's cottage. The hose faucets scattered
about
the grounds were decorative Victorian cast-iron things,
about
three feet tall, and I wish that I had a couple now. This
system
ran until AC power became available. I can remember that it
went
"clack-----clack-----clack" on about a 5-second cycle, and I
couldn't
get a satisfactory answer from my father as to how it worked
without
power. I don't expect that the pump flow rate was very
great, as it's
pumping head to the tank was easily 50 ft. Pumping 24-hours
may
have given 2 hours of garden watering. Later father put in
an AC
motor driven pump at the springhouse. He had a lot of
trouble
keeping that running as I recall. The old storage tank came
down
in the 40's when the supports went bad.