Rope and Leaky Watering Can

Found out my watering can leaks, a month ago or so. Took advantage of this: tied up the can above our basil pot and now it has a drip feeder.

Note: This isn't a perfect solution. It wets the leaves which is almost never a good thing, but it's been hot outside so I have no concern about mould growth. Other than that it's great and it's nice to be able to quickly fill up the can and walk away letting it get on with it. And it's nice to use rope. And it looks unusual.

Rope is attached to bars with an Evenk Hitch, can is pulled up with a Trucker's Hitch (with a #1058 loop), finished off with wraps. I usually never use wraps because they're such a hassle to undo even though they look good, but I can get away with it this time because I'm using the Evenk: if I need to take this down I just pull on the end.

Pulleys and Pistons

I have a fetish for pulleys. I find pulleys and rope very interesting. Anything involving rope usually interests me. No idea why. I know about 40 different types of knot, and I know how to bind and suspend a woman securely from the ceiling.

Last week I started to sketch out some ideas for good-looking configurations of pulleys and rope. No real use for it, just to play.
(click on any image for larger image)




This is one way you can rig pulleys to allow a small helium balloon to lift a 1 lb weight (assuming the ropes and pulleys weighed nothing). The second sketch is two equivalent pulley systems joined together. The left side uses fixed pulleys to give a 1:4 advantage; the right side uses a movable pulley to give a 1:2² advantage. So they balance.

So I started reading about pulleys, and then I read about simple machines. I decided I wanted to design a wind-powered water pump that fits onto a standard 55 gallon food-grade barrel. This barrel is a rain barrel. The idea is that the water will be pumped to a filter, and then drain back into the barrel. With the wind powering it, the barrel will be self-cleaning. The filter will be easily removed, cleaned and replaced to continue filtering. Not only will this filter the water with no effort, it should also look awesome.

So that's where I started. I watched some videos, read about simple machines and sketched a few ideas. Then I really got into it. I figured four ways to get a fan to pump a piston.

DIRECT ROTOR TO PISTON CONNECTION

ROTOR TO PISTON VIA LEVER

ROTOR COG TO PISTON COG TO PISTON

ROTOR COG TO PISTON COG (VIA BIKE CHAIN) TO PISTON

I also figured out something that took me a while to understand. A yaw. A yaw on a wind turbine is the big wing at the back of a wind turbine that turns the turbine around so that the blades always face upwind. I couldn't figure out how to connect the turbine to a piston pump while at the same time allowing the turbine to rotate 360°. I figured it out today and did a sketch.

MECHANICAL YAW MECHANISM

The yaw wind turbine sketch isn't to scale but everything is there. I don't know the proper symbols used on professional technical drawings but hopefully it's clear. The thing in the centre that looks like a box of marbles is a type of joint that allows the piston connection to rotate above the 'box of marbles', but not below it. The other 'box of marbles' above it is to allow the entire top part of the machine to rotate. Hope that makes sense.

All these wind turbine sketches are a simple one turbine, one pump setup. I had other ideas for water pumps that pump in both directions, a couple of different ways to connect 2 pumps to one wheel, and combining those ideas together to get two double pumps connected to one wheel. I haven't sketched them yet though.

I haven't included in the sketches the valves you require for the piston to become a water pump. There should be two one-way valves (or check valves) attached to the piston at the base, one that only allows water in from the water supply, and one that only allows water out to where it's to be pumped. I was going to make these but I think bought ones would be more reliable, and their reliability is crucial.

I think this level of mechanics was probably taught in many schools to young children, but I never did this at school, so it's new. Learning a new mechanical technique is like finding a different type of Lego block, and it introduces an asston of new permutations.

New Gutter

The wind was pretty insane yesterday. It killed my water bottle guttering. I posted on Freecycle this morning for some guttering or a length of pipe. I got a response within 10 minutes. Someone in Northfield had a 2-metre long pipe. I went to pick it up, hitched it to my bike and cycled home. Bicycles are good.

I used a jigsaw to cut the pipe, the opening I made to 2 radians. Everything else was rope work. This new pipe works far better than the Evian bottles.


The gutter is attached to the shed with trucker's hitches. Also, I tethered the gutter to the compost heap with another trucker's hitch just in case the winds come back. I tethered the filter frame to the barrel with some hitches.

GRAVITY WORKS

If you have height in your garden, such as some steps or a sharp gradient, then take advantage of it. Build yourself some self-watering planters (SWP) and link them all up. Connect the overflow of one to the input of the next and so on. This way, you can water your plants all at once. The last overflow can go to your rainbarrel.

Make sure your overflows are at least the same diameter as your inputs, a point that's often overlooked in SWP diagrams. You can chain these up as above, or like Pascal's triangle, or as a spiral. Any way you like.

Measuring Rainfall

When I hear people talk about so many "inches of rainfall" it drives me crazy. "How can you measure rainfall in inches? It's not one dimensional!", I first thought. Now I understand how it's done, I still think it's dumb.

It's done like this. You collect rainwater. You use a funnel of a certain size and it feeds into a tube. The side of the tube has a reading of so many inches. You can then say that there were so many inches of rainfall in a certain time.

This is dumb because you have to know that the container is of a specific size to understand what an 'inch of water' is. If you want to compare notes with someone else in another country, for example, you have to make sure the containers are exactly the same size. You also then have to make sure that your funnels were the same size, otherwise you have to do some calculations.

The better way is to simply measure rainfall per square metre. That way you can say, "Well, my garden is so many square metres, then it will get so much rain." Instead of saying, "Well, my garden is so many square metres, and I expect so many inches of rain, therefore that works out as...um...I'm sure it'll be fine."

How to calculate rainfall per square metre:

1) Figure the area of the top of your funnel in square centimetres. (A = πr²)
2) Catch some rain!
3) Measure how much rain(R) you catch in millilitres.
4) The amount of rain you catch per square metre is 10R/A litres per square metre.

Example: The top of my funnel has a 5cm radius. It's area is 78.54 square cms.
I catch 100ml of rain. Per square metre, that's (10 x 100)/78.54 litres = 12.7 litres.

Easy, right? Obviously to really be of any use, you'll have to measure rainfall daily or weekly for about a year and use the results to estimate what the rainfall might be like the following year. Personally, that's way too boring for me. I just work with whatever the weather throws at me. But a rant against measuring rain in inches was deserved. Because it's dumb. And it's dumb.

Evian Bottles = Rainwater Collection

Hey guys,

I drink a lot of Evian water. I'm not proud of it. I'd admit it in a courtroom.

It straight up tastes better than that shit that comes out of the tap and stinks of bleach and tastes awful. So I have a lot of empty bottles.

Today I made a gutter out of empty Evian bottles and I made rain chains out of the tops of the bottles. It's attached to the shed outside. It's pretty fricking sweet.


Temporarily, I have a bucket I found underneath the rain chain with a mesh pegged onto it for crude filtering. I reclaimed a huge plastic barrel a month or so ago from a construction site dump and once it's converted into a rainbarrel, it will sit under this guttering. Right now, the compost heaps are in the way.

WATER IS AWESOME

Urban Homesteaders know a lot about greywater systems. If you don’t know, household water is usually classified into 3 types:


CLEANWATER (or potable water): the stuff that comes out of your faucet. It has been processed and chlorinated and is safe to drink.
GREYWATER: the water you throw away after it’s been through your bathroom sink, your shower, your bath or your washing machine.
BLACKWATER: the used water from your toilet.


Looking at the diagram, you can see that cleanwater goes to your bathroom sink, bath, shower and washing machine, and becomes greywater. That greywater can then be re-used to irrigate your garden and to flush your toilet: (because what kind of idiots are we to flush our toilets with drinking water?? >_<)

If you live in an area of little rainfall and/or high water bills, then reusing greywater is important. If you live in an area of higher rainfall like Aberdeen, then reusing greywater may not be necessary.

However, a rainbarrel is useful in any situation. It's convenient to have an outside water source for watering plants and it can be attached to an outside sink which soiled gardener's hands appreciate. In any case, reusing water is cool and it's fun.

if you live in an area of high water bills and/or low rainfall, or you think it would be cool to learn how to build greywater systems, then become a greywater guerrilla. At the very least set up a rainbarrel. If you're resourceful it will cost you nothing. I 'reclaimed' my rainbarrel from a construction site.

TURNING RAINWATER INTO CLEANWATER
The major obstacle in water self-sufficiency is converting rainwater into cleanwater. Convert rainwater to cleanwater and your water supply is free. I know about filtration, reverse osmosis, chlorine, ozone, UV rays and solar stills. I know you can set up a system for just under £10,000 that'll give you over 45 kilolitres of storage, and give you a roof washer, ozone treatment, sediment and carbon filters and UV sterilisation. It'll pay itself off in about 6 years. I'm holding out until I learn the free method.