Ram pump output

A pump with two moving parts, running on falling water, forever. This tells you whether your creek can do the job.

Result

Drive head (vertical fall to the pump)6 ft

Delivery lift (pump up to the tank)60 ft

Water available at the pump10 gal/min

Efficiency60 %

Delivery

0.60 gal/min

Per day, running continuously

864 gal/day

It runs 24 hours a day with nobody watching it. That's the whole magic.

Lift ratio

10.0 : 1

Within the practical range — rams lift 10–25× the drive head.

Water returned to the creek

9.4 gal/min

The waste valve sends it back where it was going anyway.

What this will not do

No fall, no ram. You need genuinely falling water that never stops — a creek or a spring with real year-round flow and at least 3 ft of drop to the pump. This is the one requirement that cannot be engineered around.
Put an $8 vibration sensor on it. The only question a ram pump ever raises is *is it still thumping*, and it will stop silently when one stick gets into the drive pipe.
Drive pipe wants to be rigid (steel or Schedule 40 PVC), straight, and roughly 5–10× the drive head in length. A flexible drive pipe absorbs the water hammer that makes the whole thing work.

The full build and the reasoning are in Chapter 10 of the guide.