(This blog post has the potential to be discursive and go in no particular direction, so I'll try my best to remain as unwavering as I can)
It all started off when our washing machine konked off and decided to stop working. My grandma sent it off to the repairers who fixed it and then had the brilliant idea to suggest attaching a water pump so that water from the tank above would flow in much faster. Now, anyone who has played with a syringe would know that no matter how hard you push (or pull), you just can NOT for the love of anything (or anyone) get more than a certain amount of liquid through the syringe (or in this case the pipe).
Now, our pipes are really old and are rusting from the inside. This is the reason that the flow of water has gone down as compared to the time when they were first installed. Even though I suggested getting the pipes changed due to the above mentioned reason (since that is the real problem, my grandma would hear nothing from me... Oh well... so be it...)
The brilliant engineer's suggestion came as a massive shock to me and it almost felt funny. Anyways, the pump has been installed and guess what... The flow of water in the pipe is still the same!! I wonder how that happened. Isn't the pump working (scratch head, etc...)
The rate of flow of water in a pipe depends upon many things. One of them being the inner diameter of the pipe and another being the friction offered by the sides of the pipe. I don't know the exactly formula, but I am guessing it is easy to come by. The pressure exerted by the water in the tank is more than sufficient to max. out the flow rate in the pipe and I would have guessed those engineers to know that. I guess it's back to the drawing board for them ;)
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4 comments:
Or maybe they just wanted to sell an extra pump.
Sales targets drive people crazy!
lol, this guy is a washing-mahine repairing person. It's quite possible though that he runs a side-business selling pumps to unsuspecting victims like my granny.
Actually, this post was conceptualized as being a praise for the engineer who installed the pump because of the way he went about doing it. (how the tables can turn from the time you think to the time you type ;))
In the sense that he didn't just blindly hack the pump in, but sort of hooked into the washing machine interface to get the job done sort of cleanly. Just to give you a computer engg. equivalent, consider the water inlet to be a WaterSource interface. The default implementation of WaterSource is PassThroughWaterSource which takes an input and spits out the same thing as output (much like the UNIX cat command). He just re-implemented that interface to be SuckingWaterSource which actively pulls water from the source and pushes it out to the sink.
However, the dexterity and celerity with which he went about the job makes me think that it wasn't a spontaneous effort, but a well thought-out and expedient (and possibly repeated elsewhere; multiple times) effort. This isn't the first time he seems to have fooled someone ;)
LOL!
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