(image via flickr user Bench artwork)
Hip Hop hooray, SuperForest!
Over the past few days I’ve learned a lot about what water will and won’t do when you pump air through it. In trying to get the Jackpot up and running, I’ve been experimenting with sending a stream of bubbles up through a variety of diameter and length pvc pipes.
But nothing was working. The water would bubble around inside the pipes, but it wouldn’t flow to the top. There were a variety of factors that I was trouble-shooting: pipe-diameter, was the upflow pipe to wide, not wide enough? Too many bubbles? Too few bubbles? Too much air? Not enough?
I was trying everything and nothing was working.
Last night at around midnight, I took Baloo for a walk and had a flash of inspiration. There in the street lay a nice wide-mouthed drinking straw. I quickly gathered a handful of straws from the street, shuffled back up to my apartment and made an extremely simple version of the air lift.
I simply jammed one straw inside another until I had a decent length of “pipe” then I snipped a wee hole in the side of the bottom straw to allow air in, then hot-glued an air adapter in place. The whole set up took less than ten minutes. And you know what?…
It totally works!
Drinking Straw Water Air Lift from SuperForest on Vimeo.
Raising a column of water from a standing position to 31 and a half inches higher using only an air pump! Rad! So the Multiple Air Lift design will totally work, it’s just not even necessary! With a pipe thin enough in diameter and a better thought out air coupling, I’m confident that the water can be raised at least 40 inches, which is more than enough for our purposes. This makes everything much simpler.
Drinking straws! Is there anything they cannot do?
Learning is fun!
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