The past 10 days have brought the power supply division in the Kampot Intl. Village (southwest of kampot towards sihanoukville) to light. While parts of the intl. village have only minor power cuts the other part has daily powercuts of 6 hours each, every day !! The biggest impact hits the Bohemiaz, the (currently closed) Orchid Bokor and the le Jardin Resorts. Guests and owners there are suffering from the intense heat here and..... more important the lack of pumping water due to the power cuts. The lucky ones have raised Watertanks (min. 6 mtr. above ground) in order to get at least a little pressure. Best setup is at the le Jardin which uses a 2000 Ltr. Tank, 6mtr high above ground and a supply pipe of 10 cm for the buildings. They have the water pressure and... the water even when the electricity is down !

More important is to know that the current water table is almost 10 mtr. down from where it was during the rainy season. Many sucction pipes are about 12 mtr. long and carry a valve (plastic) at the bottom. This tends to break after a few years because it has to carry at least 9 mtr. of water at any time. The fatigue of material always hits the black rubber ring at the valve first. Once this is broken water leaks from the suction pipe leaving the pump dry so it has to be primed again and again. One solution is to remove the black rubber ring and glue the entire valve when its new. After that you should be good for at least 3-4 years before the glue finally gives way to the pressure.

According to the EDC Kampot parts of the Intl. Village receive Power from the Hydro Electric Power Plant of Kampot which does not produce any power currently because of the lack of water while the other part of the Intl. Village receives Electricity from Vietnam !!

If you're lucky you stick with the Vietnamese :-)

yea i live out there. our power never went out for more than a few minutes. I'm visiting family so I've been away for about a week but the wife says all is good no power cuts and the well is still flowing. i was having a problem with the pump when i first moved in- it kept losing its prime. i opened up the top and saw the pipe just stops at the top and air could get back into the system because it doesn't go below the waters surface. i put a piece of pipe down from the top to the middle of the tank under the water and haven't had a problem of losing my prime in months. so far so good on that one. i always wondered why our power wasn't going out. then again i had friends in californina during the brownouts there a few years back. i asked my friend if his parents were experiencing brown- outs. he replied- the power doesn't go out in the rich neighborhoods and laughed lol.

Water pumps are not designed to suck water, they are designed to push water.
I think there is a mathematical equation which says in therory a pump can suck up to 12 or 15 feet, but in practice only about 8 to 10 feet is able to be done.
This is why submersable pumps are used down a bore where it pushes the water up.

I speaking from years of experience of farming and building windmills.

John Bingham wrote: ↑Sat Apr 13, 2019 9:19 pm What is this "Intl. Village"? If the OP can't even be bothered to type out the proper name once I don't see why any of us should get too concerned. Low effort.

International Village is a name some real estate company invented 4 or 5 years ago, trying to sell a villa development there. It's quite a way out of Kampot with horrible roads to get there, the development didn't go through but the name stuck. There are some villa's and resorts there now though.

International Pillage is more like it.

Anyhow, no power cuts (longer than five mins) at my home in Kampot and no cuts at all at my workplace.

Do the hotels/guest houses not have generators?

Bloody mouse has been in mine and chewed the wiring so damn thing wouldn't start when we had a cut this evening (kep). After 30 minutes of fiddling and swearing and sweating I got the thing to run. A second later power was restored....

John Bingham wrote: ↑Sat Apr 13, 2019 9:48 pm Sure, thanks. The OP could have written that in the title, then used the abbreviation afterwards.

Mr Bingham. Some may think you a grumpy old man but you do hit the nail on the head quiet often.

Why do people use abbreviations and expect everyone to understand them? There was a thread recently that used abbreviations that had at least 10 different meaning depending on one's way of thinking.

Full name first and abbreviations afterwards. Je suis d'accord

Duncan wrote: ↑Sat Apr 13, 2019 9:01 pm Water pumps are not designed to suck water, they are designed to push water.
I think there is a mathematical equation which says in therory a pump can suck up to 12 or 15 feet, but in practice only about 8 to 10 feet is able to be done.
This is why submersable pumps are used down a bore where it pushes the water up.

I speaking from years of experience of farming and building windmills.

33.9 ft of water. This is the maximum height to which water can be raised by a suction pump (provided it has created a vacuum).

There is no mathematical height restriction to a pump pushing water. Just the power of the pump.