During our April 2018, rural water supply operations seminar in Johnson County, Iowa we had a chance to work with a Turbo Draft device to supply water for a simulated tanker fill site. The crew deployed the Turbo Draft into Lake McBride and supplied it using a 150 feet of 2-1/2-inch hose line from Solon Engine 132...a 1,250 gpm pumper that carries 1,000 gallons of water. The Turbo Draft then fed water through 150 feet of 5-inch LDH back to a 2,100-gallon dump tank from which Engine 132 then drafted and flowed water to a portable monitor (which simulated loading a tanker). We refer to this type of pumping arrangement as an "open relay."

With no moving parts, the Turbo Draft is easy to maintain. However, for folks that don't train with the device or understand how it works, Turbo Draft can be tricky to use. Fortunately for the folks attending this seminar, they got to see the eductor device work without any problems.

The use of the Open Relay arrangement allowed the pumper to flow 1,000 gpm from the dump tank while the TurboDraft device resupplied the dump tank at around a 500 gpm rate. Obviously, water supply will eventually run out in the dump tank, but for loading up to a 3,000 gallon tanker, this set-up works just fine.

The use of the homemade PVC fill pipe at the dump tank allowed the 5-inch LDH to remain on the ground and not kink under the low pressure.