Back to basics engineering

So what do you do when you have no equipment and you need to gather technical information? You go old school.

I wanted to find out the flow rate of the stream, so firstly I measured the width of the stream. However as a valuable commodity I wasn’t actually allowed to wander over the stream so my helpful BAWA technician Anthony got to do all the dirty work.

Then we had to measure the depth at intervals across the stream to get a cross section, as the tape measure was no match for the stream this required the use of a stick and then for the deepest section measuring how far the water went up Anthony’s leg. 

Then get the surface velocity, I used pooh sticks and timed how long it too for them to reach the other side of the damn. Then I measure the distance to the damn and how far across the stream the sticks went to get the distance. 

Then it was time for testing my soil sample. I took a handful of soil from one of the farms where the irrigation project will be implemented.  By using my trusty textbooks ‘Soil mechanics’ by G.E. Barnes and ‘Hydrology in Practice’ by Elizabeth M. Shaw I was able to gather some basic soil information like colour consistency even an approximate soil type by observation and feel.  We also managed to calculate void ratio for a fully saturated sample as we measure how much water it took to saturate a 100ml sample of uncompressed soil.

On a funny note, when trying to calculate the flow out of a pipe you can use a simple bucket measurement and stopwatch approach. However make sure that you’re not measuring something that later turned out to be a 28 litres a second outflow with a bucket that has only 12 litre capacity or you’re going to get wet