BUSINESS LEADER A riverscreen floating pump.
Riverscreen’s Versatile Floating Pump
T
he Riverscreen is an innovative floating screen that can pump and filter out debris from running water as shallow as 4 inches. Bob Wietharn, the company’s founder and the inventor of the Riverscreen, has also invented a floating pump screen that can handle pumps moving anywhere from 20 to 5,000 gallons per minute. This makes it useful for a broad variety of applications, from supplying single users with water to supplying entire irrigation districts. In this interview, Mr. Wietharn speaks with the editor-inchief of Irrigation Leader, Kris Polly, about his invention and its broad variety of current applications. Kris Polly: Please tell us about your company’s history and how you got started.
36 | IRRIGATION LEADER
Kris Polly: What year did you make your first floating pump screen? Bob Wietharn: In 2008, a drip tape company contacted me to ask whether we could put 120 mesh on our Riverscreens so that they could pump water out of rivers and streams directly through their drip tape. We proceeded to develop what we call a Gravity Flow Riverscreen. The outlet pipe of the Gravity Flow Riverscreen is submerged, and the rotating drum is about 70 percent submerged. This varies from our standard model, which is about 30 percent submerged and can pump out of as little as 4 inches of water. The point of this model is to get more of the rotating drum in the water, because in the past, we couldn’t get enough water through our standard Riverscreens when operating in extremely dirty water sources with a lot of silt. In the field test, the Riverscreen ran for about 2 hours. They said that 15 engineers had worked on this problem for several years and had never been able to pump from this particular stream without the screen failing after a few minutes. Down the road, that company decided that our floating screens were too expensive for their market, so we ended up parting ways. I felt, though, there were other uses for the
PHOTOS COURTESY OF RIVERSCREEN.
Bob Wietharn: In 1996, we attempted pumping water from a local river into a center pivot. It was nearly impossible because of the problem of plugging nozzles. The debris was so terrible that we had problems keeping the pump primed. The following year, I tried to find a screen to help me with the issue, but I couldn’t find anything available on the market. So in 1997, we built the first prototype Riverscreen and went through the summer with high hopes and even better results. The unit was originally made out of steel and was very heavy. Seeing that the prototype unit wouldn’t hold up over time, the following summer I set out to build one out of aluminum. Word spread quickly, and soon my neighbors started asking me to build them Riverscreens as well. After building a couple the first year, word got around even faster. We built 12 Riverscreens with the expectation
that we would have them in stock to sell over a couple seasons. That was 1999. By the fall, we had sold every unit we had built. This continued year after year, and we scaled our operations to try to keep up with demand. In 2001, we decided to incorporate. This was when Riverscreen became trademarked.
