Nov 14, 2008 4:37 pm US/Pacific
Good Question: How Do Dancing Fountains Work?
ROSEVILLE (CBS13) ―
In this economy it's not often you see an investment in public art. But in Roseville, they recently put in a musical fountain at the new shopping plaza called the Fountains.
These excited little ones love what they see, but like most of us have no clue that the dancing fountain at the Fountains is a technical feat of engineering.
The musical fountain is choreographed to music and has 108 jets that all synchronize to music. There are speakers and lighting so at night it's almost like a fireworks show. It's pretty spectacular! It also took three months to build.
"A pipe breaks, the vault fills up and there goes a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment," said Mark Hansen, Nimbus Fountain Construction & Design
The vault he's talking about is the nerve center of this water ballet. It's a high-tech room filled with computers, pipes and pumps.
"When the programmer comes in he's got -- if you can just imagine -- a huge amount of line graphs, said Mark."We've got a lot of different outputs, fountain nozzles, all the lights…each individual item needs to be programmed into the beat so that's all done on a lap top."
Mark points to an electrical unit. "These are called VFD's, they control the hertz that go to the individual motors…this is how we get the water to jump up and jump down.
Pointing at black motors fitted to pipes, Mark talks about the work horses of the operation. "These are the five pumps…we've got five different pumps that operate the five different rings."
The pumps pull from 10 to 40 horsepower to force the water out through the valves in those rings.
"At one time when everything shoots up in the air we have about 3,000 gallons a minute up in the air so it's a huge amount of water up in the air so it's about 70 pounds of pressure."
But to Mark, it's not all about the engineering aspects of the fountain. "It's really fun to see the kids come out and scream -- their eyes light up - it's big -- especially in the evening."
Our area is lucky to have these fountains. San Diego has a dancing waters feature in the Gas Lamp district, but we've learned it may be turned off to save cash.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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