The Breur ram

Cast water rams, such as the Billabong, are expensive, solid, and provide a lot of water. They cannot be made locally.

In order to make the water ram more useful and because the operating principle of a water ram is quite simple, some organizations have successfully developed self-built rams. In 1996 WOT volunteer Gert Breur also designed a water ram: the Breur ram. This ram is developed for small-scale applications.

You can install the water ram yourself with very cheap and easily available parts. The costs for the parts of the ram in the Netherlands are around €70.

The water ram has remarkably high efficiency. If 600 liters of water is supplied from a height of 1 meter, 60 liters of water are brought to a height of 7 meters. This is an efficiency of 70%. However, due to the ram’s small size, this takes a long time, about 130 minutes. Because a water ram runs 24 hours a day, without extra costs or supervision, this should not be a problem.

You can find the publication of the technical description in English, in Spanish or in Dutch here.