ourpump.com blog

Remember the terrible snowfalls of last year? Remember the nightmare it was attempting to get any where for days after? I do. What I remember far more vividly though is the nuisance of a flooded basement that only came as the snow melted away and began to back up sewers all over the place. I remember the annoyance of trying to hunt down a functional sump pump. I remember finding what I thought was one from a friend and having to pay for sump pump repair. With the crisp air finally making a comeback after a mild fall and holiday season I am trying to stay incredibly aware of whether I need sump pump repair this year.

After our emergency last year, (and after springing for that sump pump repair) I ran right out and bought a pump for my family and myself. Of course as the events of last year taught us that is not a one hundred percent guarantee. In fact the fact that in the hurricanes and various other torrential downpours we have managed to avoid more flooding seems to be a small miracle. However, and there is a big however, not running a sump pump for a year or more can mean you do not know how the thing will handle should flooding occur. We may get it into a four-foot pool of standing water in the basement only to discover it needs an exhaust fan repair.

With these concerns in mind the colder air has me checking my pump on a nearly weekly basis. Running it to assure that pressure reducing valves still work and everything else is operational as well. I have little interest in going through the problems that plagued us and likely countless others in 2011. Having one of these handy pumps it would seem was only part of the battle.

Of course I have taken other precautions. While times are tight I did what I could to cheaply weather proof the basement. I sealed windows with plastic and made sure our drains and gutters were completely clear of clogging debris. That said there is not much hope on my end that we could continue dodging bullets forever. At some point I will be forced to pump the basement once again. When that moment comes I will not only be ready I will feel a rabid sense of self=satisfaction about my general preparedness.

The concave shape of the barrel allows the pump to be attached direct to the frame without the need for separate pump clips or a bottle-cage-mounted holder. A good idea in principle, but this assumes your frame tubes are cylindrical or ovoid - at least in the area where you want to fix the pump. In most cases, assuming you’ve got two bottle cages, this means putting the pump on the underside of the top- tube, but that’s only possible if your back brake cable runs along the upper side.

Once you’ve got over that hurdle, the pump is secured by two nylon straps with Velcro tabs. Fitting the pump before a test-ride, I couldn’t get the Velcro straps tight enough, and the pump rattled very slightly. There are small rubber studs on the pump to prevent damage to the frame, but these seemed not totally effective at stopping movement. Actually, they’re not rubber, but something called Kraton, which is also used on things like knife handles and golf clubs. All good stuff; perhaps if these studs were bigger, the rattling wouldn’t occur.

Having said that, the BBB website indicates that the pump comes with a rubber strap, rather than the nylon straps that came with our test model. This should help keep the pump tight against the frame. I got round the problem by fixing the pump onto my frame with insulation tape. Employing the same technique, you could also possibly attach the pump to a seat-tube or down-tube, thereby avoiding the need for a top-tube with cable on the upper side.

The Oval Integrate pump comes in three sizes. A true mini version (230mm), a large version (430mm) and a medium (330mm) which we’re testing here. The medium version seems to be a good compromise and avoids the issues common to all minipumps (low weight but takes all day to get a tyre up to pressure) and full-sized pumps (get the tyre up quickly, but weigh a lot and don’t fit many modern frames). The slim-line design of the Oval Integrate also compares well against some other medium-sized pumps which are bulky and spoil the lines of a nice bike.

Medium or not, the concave shape of the barrel inevitably means it has a smaller capacity than a cylinder the same diameter, so it still takes a while to get a road tyre up to pressure. In the road.cc lab, it took 220 thrusts on the medium sized pump to get a
700×23 tyre up to 100psi. And the last 10psi were a bit of an effort to get in - maybe not surprising, as the pump’s maximum psi is given as 115psi. If you’re using it for get-you-home emergency situations, then 70psi will be fine and much easier to attain. And if you’re touring or commuting and normally run your tyres at around 70psi anyway, then all this high pressure talk is academic.

Whatever pressure you go for, pumping is made more comfortable by the shape of the handle, which swivels out to form a broad pad in the palm of your hand (and also has a covering of Kraton), although if you don’t hold it firmly it rocks on its pivot, which is annoying and actually makes pumping harder. The piston also rocks a little in the barrel when you pump hard, but the seals seem good, and there’s no sign of air escaping. The pump has a direct push-on fit with a small lock/unlock lever, so no hose to screw separately onto the valve.

The Oval Integrate’s unusual design and attachment technique takes a while to get your head around, and you need to make sure you’ve got the pump tightly and safely fixed to your frame, but if you don’t like genuine mini pumps (because they’re too slow) or some other medium-sized pumps (because they’re too bulky and look ugly on your bike), or full-size pumps (because they’re too heavy or don’t fit your frame), then the medium-sized Oval Integrate might be a good option to consider.

All the Oval Integrate pumps are available in black or silver, with the medium retailing at around £25 in bike shops, and around £20 at the usual on-line stores. I was going to say ‘this is a fair price compared to other similar products’. But as there’s nothing
else like it, I’ll just have to say it’s a fair price, period.

With more and more heart disease, the use of heart pumps more and more frequent.When an ailing heart can’t move blood on its own, an implanted pump can help keep it flowing smoothly. But there’s a major drawback: the power supply is large, must be housed outside the body, and is usually connected to the pump via an electric cord that runs through the abdominal wall—a source of constant irritation and potential infection.

Researchers have now demonstrated a prototype wireless heart pump that eliminates the need for the cord altogether. And unlike some wireless implants, it is reliable and efficient over a range of distances, from a few centimeters to a meter or more.

The pump was developed by Josh Smith, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Washington, and Pramod Bonde, a heart surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and presented at the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs’ annual meeting in Washington, D.C., last month.

Most implanted medical devices, such as pacemakers and defibrillators, can work with internal batteries, but heart pumps and artificial hearts require more power. An artificial heart called the AbioCor is powered wirelessly, but the power transmitter,
affixed to the skin, has to stay aligned with the receiver inside the body. “Just a few millimeters of separation and misalignment results in energy loss,” says Bonde.

Smith and Bonde’s new wireless pump gets around the alignment problem by modifying the way power is sent and received. The external power transmitter is a metal coil that emits an oscillating magnetic field around 6.78 megahertz and 13.56 megahertz. The receiving coil inside the body is tuned to resonate with the frequency of the transmitting coil at about 80 percent efficiency. When the distance between the coil changes, however, the efficiency drops, unless it is possible to adjust the frequency over which the power is transferred. Smith has designed a feedback system that maximizes efficiency by automatically adjusting the frequency of the power transfer.

Transferring power via a magnetic field instead of an electric field avoids harmful heating, but there is still a slight rise in temperature from a residual electric field. Smith says that eliminating some of the coil packaging will ultimately reduce heating to
a negligible amount.

The new wireless power system could free up heart-pump designers to innovate. A power supply that can operate over a range of distances could be worn in a vest or even installed in a house. Smith and Bonde envision a whole-home system in which a person can move freely without wearing a power supply. A small implantable battery could also offer a half-hour of backup power.

Recent work in wireless power transfer has focused mainly on increasing efficiency, says Matt Reynolds, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. “Adapting to movement by tuning the operating frequency and maintaining resonance,” he says, “is also critical to achieving widespread acceptance of this technology.”

Recent Chevron plans to pump oil with solar power

Chevron will tap sunlight to help it get more oil out of the ground in California. The company will partner with BrightSource
Energy—a solar start-up that Chevron helps fund—to develop 29 megawatts of thermal power from the sun’s rays.

The idea is simple (and ancient): use mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays onto a water tank, turning said water to steam. The steam
can then be used to turn a turbine and produce electricity or, in this case, pumped down a well to loosen heavy oils.

The plant slated for the Coalinga Oil Field near Fresno will employ at least 3,000 mirrors to concentrate light on a more than
300-foot tower with water inside. Chevron hopes it will be fully operational by the end of next year. “The only problem we have is
when it’s cloudy,” said Sergio Hoyos, a business developer at Chevron Technology Ventures, at the city council meeting last week
where the plan was unveiled, according to Reuters.

As it stands, oil companies typically burn natural gas to produce the steam necessary to get the oil flowing, and that method will
still likely be the case at night and for most of the day. But this trial plant will enable Chevron to determine whether such solar
thermal projects might be appropriate for other oil fields.

Similar efforts are underway with other solar thermal companies: Ausra helps supply steam to a coal-fired power plant to boost
efficiency in Australia, and the Electric Power Research Institute is studying the technology for use in fossil-fuel burning power
plants.

Of course, BrightSource will also likely be busy building the 2.6 gigawatt’s worth of solar thermal power plants it has announced
contracts for in California alone. The company is a revived form of Luz, which built the world’s first operating solar thermal power
plants near Bakersfield, Calif., in the 1980s before becoming defunct.

 There’s no word on how much the oil-heating solar thermal facility will cost to build this time around, but perhaps this is why an
oil company would invest in a solar power resurrection. After all, with climate legislation looming, carbon dioxide emissions saved
are carbon dioxide emissions turned into cash.

You know it can be nanoscale pump it? You may not believe, but now the world’s smallest has been manufactured out,it is the nanoscale pump . The world’s smallest pump will be used for health care.

A team of engineers has created the world’s smallest pump. The minute device, similar in size to a human red blood cell, is powered by an electrode made from something that doesn’t usually conduct electricity — glass.

Applying an electrical current to nanodevices is inherently tricky. Using non-conductive materials makes it even more difficult because they require wires inserted into them, yet they tend to be too small to make the integration of all these moving parts possible.

To solve this problem, Alan Hunt from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his colleagues used a laser to hollow out a bent pipe inside a piece of glass. This resulted in a tiny tunnel with a thin glass wall at one end.

Insulating materials such as glass, wood and plastic can conduct electricity at high voltages, but they usually suffer in the process. ”When lightning hits your house, the bolt will pass through your roof, but you end up with a lot of damage,” says Hunt.

But a few years ago, his team found that at the nanoscale, ordinary glass becomes conductive without breaking. “When you go down to the nanoscale, the world doesn’t behave as we’re used to,” says Hunt.

If Alice ate a mushroom in Wonderland and shrank to the size of a gnat, says Hunt, the thread in her dress would be about as thick as the conductive glass wall in the electrode.

Gas pump , also known as air compressors, is the main gas supply, it is the original motive (usually motor) of the mechanical energy into the gas pressure to the device, the air pressure generating device. Pump gas pump and in general different, it’s working medium gases, liquids or other media not.
Large side air-driven piston, a small area of high pressure gas output end to be. Output Pressure: 2690bar (269MPa), in which oxygen maximum 5000psi (34.5MPa). Series of two gas booster pump booster pump, low pressure can be increased to a high pressure gas, driving pressure =<7bar, gas input pressure range of 0.5-10bar, maximum to 90Mpa. Pump for the series and N series to the exactly the same way, the entire pump is used in all aluminum and stainless steel. Pump gas drive in the series required some type of gas lubrication, so seals and other internal parts to be lubricated, the series of pump-driven piston diameter of 160mm.. Series single-stage gas booster pump booster pump, gas pressure to achieve the desired input type requires a certain degree of pressure preload, increased pressure due to the pre-maximum pressure varies. Maximum boost to 80Mpa. The pump for the same way as B series, the difference is that the series B Series pumps manufactured on the basis of two-headed pump, the entire pump used in all aluminum and stainless steel.

The pump drive piston diameter of 160mm, drive pressure =<8bar. Both ends of the pump head are cooled with exhaust, factory two inlet and two exit lines can be connected to user requirements. H Series gas booster pump single air control valve to non-equilibrium distribution of the pump the gas back and forth movement, all aluminum and stainless steel. All seals are imported quality products, designed to drive the maximum pressure are 10bar, proposed in order to ensure the life of the pump-driven pressure <8bar. The pump drive piston diameter of 160mm, the role of a single pump, all pumps are single acting with exhaust cooling.

Heat pump technology in recent years, much attention in the world of new energy technologies.People familiar with the “pump” is a potential energy can improve the mechanical equipment, such as the water pump is mainly pumped from the low high.The “heat pump” is a natural from the air, water or soil to obtain low-grade heat, acting through the power, it can be used to provide high-grade thermal energy device.

GAIA Acqua from Clivet is the new heat pump that replaces boilers and airconditioners - renewable energy; packaged unit; for home comfort; water cooled; capacity from 7, 8 to 19 kW. GAIA Acqua can be used with radiant panel systems, room terminals and radiators. It includes all the necessary devices to ensure summer and winter air-conditioning as well as the production of domestic hot water. Installation times and costs are drastically reduced because GAIA Acqua contains the pumping groups, the domestic hot water storage tanks and connection to solar panels.

Electronic control allows to freely establish temperature, humidity and operating times. Once set, the control automatically manages summer or winter operation, and the production of domestic hot water. Overall energy efficiency is maximized through constant monitoring of building needs and of the temperature of fresh air.

GAIA Acqua provides you with winter heating and summer cooling with the maximum energy efficiency thanks to the DC inverter technology applied to the compressor and to the circulators. Thanks to the inverter, the speed of the various devices can be
adjusted based on the actual requested energy, allowing further reduction of consumption and a substantial increase in seasonal efficiency;

The unit features a 200 liter tank for domestic water that can be heated by solar panels. On days when solar heating is not sufficient or if solar panels have not been installed, the domestic hot water will be heated by the energy contained in the air,
earth or water. GAIA Acqua avoids energy wastage thanks to the inverter circulator for the circulation of hot water in the domestic hot water circuit?or if solar panels have not been installed, the domestic hot water will be heated by the energy contained in the air, earth or water. GAIA Acqua avoids energy wastage thanks to the inverter circulator for the circulation of hot water in the domestic hot water circuit.