Urban Survivalists

This post is, admittedly, a synthesis post for the rainwater collection system and the rain water filtration system. However, we had to categorize it somewhere, and so this is what we chose. This week, we hooked up all the houses to the clean inside barrel from the filter box! We also made a float switch for the dirty barrel.

Since we figured out an awesome, no leak, hose to barrel connection, we decided to use this connection type for the clean water barrel as well. The clean water barrel was going to be in the house, so leaking was pretty much prohibited.

Connecting the RO System to the Rain Water Collection System

Materials:

1. Metal pipe flange (1)
2. Silcock (1)
3. Pipe thread tape (1)
4. 1/4″x 1″ lag screws (2)
5. Aquarium silicon sealant (2)
6. Female to female adapter for garden hoses (2)
7. Close up of female to female adapter (3)
8. Garden hose (4)
9. Wrench
10. Drill

1	2	3	4

Steps:

1. While it is not shown in the pictures until the end, we actually moved a clean barrel into our laundry room and put the filter box on top of it. Otherwise, in step one, you can see us drilling pilot holes for the 1/4″ lag screws into the barrel.
2. Next, drill the larger center hole for the pipe flange into the barrel.
3. Just an image of the holes we just made, should be 5 total although its hard to see.
4. Put pipe thread tape on the silcock at the location where it is to join to the pipe flange.
5. Also put pipe thread tape on the silcock where it is to join to the garden hose.
6. Thread the silcock onto the flange.
7. Thread the female to female adapter onto the silcock. This is so the garden hose will fit.
8. Apply the aquarium silicon to the back of the metal pipe flange, you are trying to make it water tight.
9. Use a wrench to tighten the 1/4″ lag screws through the pilot holes. Tighten enough that silicon sealant squishes out.
10. Attach the other end of the female to female adapter the garden hose.
11. Attach the garden hose to the silcock connection unit you just made.
12. Run the garden hose up, the blue one, and attach to the filter box. Also attach a hose from the filter box to the bung hole of the barrel, this is the clean water into the barrel line shown in light green.
13. Now get another garden hose, dark green, and run it from the dirty water in faucet to the silcock at the bottom of the rain barrels.
14. This is the view of the dirty water line from the rain barrels.
15. This is the vie from the dirty water line to the filter box. Yes, the hose went from outside, through the dryer vent, and into the laundry room to attach to the filter box.
16. Done with hose attachments!

1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15

Here is a larger image of how the total system worked out. Yes, our laundry room has a toilet…incase you need to go pee in between switch loads of laundry.

Building a Float Switch for the Rain Barrel

The next order of business was finding a way to tell the clean water pumps to turn off. This means we needed a float switch in the dirty/rain water barrel to tell the pump to turn off before it sucks out all the water in the barrels. In order to do this, we needed a switch that would stay depressed until the water level is lowered enough to drop the float to the bottom. As long as the water level is high, the float wants to go to the surface, and applies pressure to the switch to keep it depressed. So, we needed something that would keep the float in line with the switch, and a float that would fit in the bung hole of the barrel. This presented some difficulty as the bung hole in any barrel is fairly small.

What we came up with seems to work very well. The steps for building it are very simple and don’t require anything you don’t have on hand after making the rainwater collection system and the filtration box.

Materials/Tools

1. ~3ft of 1″ PVC pipe. Any schedule.
2. ~3ft of 1/2″ PVC pipe. The type used on the filter box which you probably have extra of.
3. One normally off push button. Should be a very light push button and should fit in 1″ PVC pipe.
4. One plastic water bottle that will fit through the bunghole on the barrel.
5. 1/4″ flange washer. Inner hole is 1/4″ while outer diameter is just slightly less than 1″.
6. Aquarium silicone.
7. Two small zip ties.
8. Drill bit that will drill a hole big enough to fit your zip ties.
9. Drill.
10. 7/8″ spade drill bit.
11. Utility knife.

Steps

1. Cut the 1″ PVC to a length such that it is a water bottle length (the one you have that fits through the bunghole) plus 2 inches from the top of your pips connecting your barrels together to the top of the barrel. So, for a normal 55 gallon barrel, this will be slightly less than 3 ft.
2. (Pic 1) Drill out the bunghole cap with the 7/8″ bit.
3. Shave off excess until 1″ PVC pipe just barely fits into it. Should be a tight, interference fit.
4. (Pic 2) Fit your bunghole cap onto your 1″ PVC end such that 1″ of PVC extends beyond the top of the cap.
5. Drill two small holes in the protruding end of PVC.
6. (Pic 3-7) Attach your button to the PVC end with zip ties as shown. Button should fit into the hole and the shoulders should rest on the edges of the 1″ PVC.
7. (Pic 8.) Take a 3ft length of 1/2″ PVC and silicone the water bottle onto it as shown. Let sit for 24 hours.
8. (Pic 9) After the silicone is dry, insert the 1/2″ pvc into the 1″ PVC and note how much of the 1/2″ PVC needs to be cut off to get the water bottle end within 1″ of the start of the 1″ PVC. Make sure the 1/2″ PVC is firmly contacting the button on the end of the 1″ PVC.
9. Cut the 1/2″ PVC to length and test fit. Cutting it to long is better than too short so if you are in doubt, start long and then slowly shorten it up.
10. (Pic 10-12) Put your flange washer on the end of the 1/2″ PVC and then insert this unit into the 1″ PVC . Slide the 1/2″ inner portion up into the 1″ pipe until the washer is sandwiched firmly between the button and the 1/2″ pipe. This will stop the botton from going into the 1/2″ pipe.
11. (Pic 13-14) Put the whole unit down into the barrel and screw in the bungcap. The water bottle should slide down and rest on the bottom of the barrel but never come all the way out of the 1″ pipe. This is most easily done if your barrel is 1/3 to 1/2 full at the time so that the inner portion doesn’t fall all the way out during insertion.
12. (Pic 15) Cover with something that won’t blow away.
13. Done!

1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15

Final Assembly and First Test

Now this whole mess must be connected together and tested!

1. Wire your dirty water and clean water float switchs to your Arduino.
2. Test to make sure they still work.
3. Connect your dirty barrel outlet to your dirty water inlet on the filter box. If you built this like we did, that will be the second from the top silcock.
4. Connect your clean water form the RO system (top silcock on our system) to the intake of your clean barrel. We just ran it down through the unused bunghole.
5. Connect your clen water barrel outlet to your clean water intake of the filter box (bottom silcock on our box even though we show the second to bottom hooked up…oops!)
6. Open your silcock on the dirty barrel outlets, the clean barrel outlet, and all bottom the second to bottom silcock on the filter box–i.e. all the silcocks you have installed excepting the clean water outlet of our filter box.
7. Put the dirty water outlet from the RO system into a drain or run it outside. It will run continuously as the RO system filters.
8. Now, put some clean water in your clean water barrel and wait for a rain event to put some in your dirty barrels.
9. Plug the filter box in and give it a bit to suck in some dirty water from the tank. We found it was beneficial to prime the line first by forcing some water into the whole line with the garden hose so that the pump wouldn’t have to work overly long to get water into it. No worries though, the pumps are rated to run dry with no damage.
10. Eventually the pump should prime and you should see your three stage pre-filtes fill up with water. Success!
11. Give it a bit longer and the reject water will begin to flow and shortly after that the clean water out of the RO system and into your tank.
12. Monitor your setup until either the dirty tanks empty or you clean tank completely fills. Either event should cause a shutdown of your dirty pump.
13. Done! Wait for the rain and enjoy your nice clean water!

Things to fix

During this final phase of assembly and integration, we noticed a few key issues that need to be fixed before leaving the system on long term. They are, in order of importance:

1. Pressure vessel after dirty water pump but before RO system so that the pump doesn’t have to go on and off so frequenty. The pump, as it stands now, cycles on and off about once every two seconds continuously while there is dirty water to be pumped or room in the clean barrel. These pumps have a limited number of cycles before the switches burn out and have to be replaced. We want to minimize this and a pressure vessle will do just that.
2. The hoses connecting the systems, with the exception of the curly hose, collapse under suction or heat and don’t offer a good flow to the pumps. This will just cause the pumps to work harder and use more energy and produce more heat thus shortening their lives. We want to get rigid vinyl piping and standard barb connectors to run out to the barrels from the filter box.
3. The solinoid on the sprinkler valve gets very very very hot. Too hot to touch in fact. This isn’t really that good. We’ve measured the voltage coming in off of it and it isn’t too high, it’s the 24 volts it needs. We think the problem is that the flow through the valve is what would normally cool the solinoid. In our application, that flow is fairly slow since our RO system can only do 100 gpd (That’s .0694 GPM for those of you keeping track) which isn’t enough to cool the valve. The valves are dirt cheap so we are tempted to just run the sucker till it dies on us but then there is the problem of the tanks overflowing or the pumps running dry for hous on end. We don’t want to damge any of the other systems but we don’t really know what to do.

In our future posts we will build fixes for problems 1 and 2 and hope for inspiration to fix problem 3. Problem 1 has fairly easy solution in the form of more large bore PVC sections to act as pressure vessles. Since our output line is not pressurized, we can cap off the lines going to the pressure tank and use that space for our makeshift pressure vessle. Or, perhaps we can use the pressure tank as the vessle in the already in-place system…that’s a good idea. We’ll look into that.

Next Time

Anyway, we swear we are still working on the aeroponics system and it is almost fully functional but we just get side tracked. Besides, with the heat here in Portland the last couple of days, we can ll use a bit more clean water to cool off our lives!

Be safe and sustainable!

Pam & Stan