Water Tower

Hey, just looking for some insight and opinions on building a water tower on property.
The options are cement or angle bar.
Here are my thoughts, looking for more or affirmation.
1. Cement mixing here sucks (we have all agreed on this to one extent or another with soup being called concreat) and is prone to breaking be it due to earhquakes, load bearing, or just crappy building.

2. Anglebar will rust, even painted the saltwater and sunlight rust and damage the iron. Also, from my experiance, metal workers can't be trusted. Bad measuring, spot vs full welding, and sub-par iron.
If it helps, we would like new the tower to be about 10M (gives a bit more preasure to the waterhoses).
Thanks

 

You might want to consider a pressure pump with an accumulator (aka bladder tank). Maybe others can comment on this.

Here is a video. You can include a battery back-up if you want.

 

We have a 80m borehole with Grundfoss pump feeding up to a 1500ltr tank on a 7m tower (3" angle iron on concrete footings) with walkaround platform. This gravity feeds to a pressure pump with accumulator giving us around 3.5 Bar constant water pressure. The tower is welded, and bolted in places, red-leaded then finish coated. It's been up 11 years and the rust is just starting to show through so we'll strip back and refinish next year.

I agree with your comments about welders here in general but we were lucky to find a reasonable one that did a decent job albeit under constant supervision and guidance.

 

Is it not possible to find a pump that can provide the necessary pressure on demand?

 

Can you not get Galvanized steel angle in the Philippines?

 

Currently we do have the tank (1800L) set up to a bladder presure tank but the tower we have 30M from the house and is rusting.
After yelling at the metal worker and having him finish welding we got a 2nd guy to make the footings larger and add support beams under the water tank because the 1st person used flat bar instead if angle bar, also no flat steal plate under the tank.
Looks like the next "nice weather" project is stripping paint and grinding rust to then apply a more durable finish. Maybe that will buy some time.

 

As Rye83 quite rightly said, the accumulator tank provides a more constant pressure and attenuates pump pulsations. Downstream of the tank we have a pressure switch which, when activated at a preset level (2.5 Bar), turns the pump on to recharge the system and then turns it off when the upper limit (4 Bar) is reached. This prevents unnecessary pressure spikes and prolongs the life of the pump. This setup gives us approximately 100ltr of constant water pressure before the pump needs to kick-in - which is plenty for most uses (we only have showers - no bath).

 

In my experience (2 years now), for the average household that depends on city water rather than pumping it up themselves, a simple setup with storage tank, waterpump and pressure tank works quite well to beat the sadly very underwhelming water pressure from Metro (formerly Dumaguete water district).
If you pick a storage tank that holds two to three days of water use (say 750 liters), a trustworthy pump (Pedrollo is a good Italian brand), and a fair sized pressure tank (say 150 liters, to limit the number of times to pump needs to run), and a good installer, then you end up with something like below and no more worries about water pressure. Obviously, you do need to spend some money, I would guess around 50,000 peso now.