Justin Batrouney

Fixing a noisy heater

2009-07-03T19:25:00.006+10:00

"What the hell is that!" my wife and I sleepily blurted at 4am as a loud banging noise came through our bedroom window. Like a good husband I got up to investigate. It didn't take long to realise the noise was coming from our gas central heating unit located outside our bedroom. Too tiered and too dark to do anything about it, I turned the heater off and went back to bed.

Later that morning I took the cover off to see if I could see what was wrong. There was nothing obvious, but the noise only occurred when the fan was running. It was more than just noise, the whole heater unit was vibrating madly. I suspected it was warn bearings in the fan motor, but being a gas appliance that I wasn't familiar with I was reluctant to pull the unit apart any further to investigate. I was also very busy at work that week and didn't really have time to stuff around with it. So we decided to call an expert.

After about 3 days of no heating a service man finally came. He had a look and decided we needed a new fan motor. It would cost $450. Shocked by the price, but sick of being cold, I agreed to ordering a new motor which would take another 3 days or so to arrive.

That night, while lying freezing in bed I thought surely I could replace the bearings in the motor. If I stuffed the motor trying I'm no worse off.

So the next day I pulled the heater apart. The fan motor was really easy to get to. It sits under the combustion fan which is only held down by 6 screws and is completely separate from the scary gas components.

The fan and motor sit in a housing which after disconnecting a few wires simply lifts out.

Once I had the housing out, I removed the motor and fan to take a closer look. As soon as I did the cause of the problem was obvious. It was not the bearing, but the fan. The fan slides onto the motor shaft and is anchored to it with a small bolt. This bolt had come loose allowing the fan to slip on the motor shaft. The fan had managed to slide down the shaft and was sitting on a strange angle. When the motor span, the fan was off centre and was causing the motor and housing to vibrate.

"How good is this" I thought. I slide the fan back into the correct position on the shaft and tightened the bolt. I gave the fan a spin and it seemed to be much more centred now.

I put the heater back together and turned it on. It ran perfectly. No noise, no vibration, no $450!

I rang the service man, canceled the motor and then settled in for the evening to enjoy the warmth.

Later that night we could hear a noise coming from outside. My heart sank as I realised it was the heater again. Another night of freezingness.

The next day I again pulled the heater apart, and like before the fan had slipped on the motor shaft and was sitting on a strange angle. Again, I realigned the fan and tightened the bolt. It seemed to be ok, but the shaft did look very warn. I held the shaft tight with one hand and tried to spin the fan with the other. Amazingly the fan span freely on the shaft. The shaft seemed to have warn and no longer sat snugly enough in the fan for the bolt to anchor it.

Sick of stuffing around, I took the motor/fan into the shed and welded them together.

Crude I know, but it hasn't made a sound since.

How to remove a plaster archway

2009-06-18T17:49:00.001+10:00

We recently purchased a 'new' home. It was built in the early 80's in the brief period when archways were all the go. We were lucky enough to score 6 of them.

After about 2 months we decided we couldn't stand them any longer so I thought I would have a go at squaring them up. It turned out to be exteamly easy and something anyone could do.

I had no idea how the archways were made and what timber was behind them in the wall. I assumed it was just plaster and if I cut around it I could just smash it out.

I wasn't really sure what size to make the new opening. Obviously the width has already been established, but I wasn't sure of the height. I thought I might want to put a door in the hole one day so figured I would base it on a standard door size (2040mm plus plus 20mm for the jam). With a level, I very carefully drew straight lines on the plaster around the arch to suit the standard door size. Then using a plaster knife started to carefully cut along the lines.

I was reasonably apprehensive with the cutting - after all I didn't really know what I was doing. After about 10 minutes I had cut right along the lines and the plaster above the arch was now free. I then bashed this plaster out. To my supprise right around my cut out was timber framing. The archway is actually built inside a door frame. This was fantastic - I thought I was going to have to put a nogan across the top - but it was already there.

The plaster on the other side of the wall came out much quicker now that I sort of knew what I was doing. I didn't bother drawing lines - but instead just cut along the timber frame. I have no idea how the arch itself was made. Somehow they managed to bend the plaster and the metal angle around its edge to form the shape. I'm sure it took someone a lot of time and skill to create it. It only took a hammer and tin snips to get rid of it.

With the arch completly gone and the timber door frame now visible, it was now time to neaten it up. This was simply a matter of nailing plaster board to the timber frame, running external angle around the edge and plastering it all up.

After a few coats of plaster and a few sands the job was finished. Well sort of. To my wife's and asthmatic children's delight, it took the next 2 months to get the plaster dust out of the house. Note to self : put some drop sheets down next time.

When we moved into this house there were 6 arch ways. Now there are none. All 6 were built the same way - inside a door frame. 3 of the arch ways we simply squared up, 1 we put a door in, 1 we filled in with a wall. The last was in our front entrance. We decided to make a feature of this one and boxed it out.

Apart from the dust, this was a very easy project and has made a huge difference to the look of the house.

Rebuilding your vehicle’s power steering system

2008-05-24T22:28:00.009+10:00

A tale of luck, marriage and $48.

In the not so distant past, I purchased a 10 year old Mitsubishi Triton dual-cab ute. I had wanted a ute for years, but had never been able to afford one. Utes seem to hold their value much better than cars - costing around 25% more than a comparable age car.

One day I saw a ute on eBay. It was cheap and looked in good nick so I bought it! Yes that’s right - I bought it. No inspection – I just bought it.

Upon getting the ute home I realized the power steering system was leaking everywhere. It was using its whole reservoir of fluid every 100 kms! The pump was leaking in multiple places and so too was the steering gear box. To make it worse the pump is very close to the fan which was doing a great job distributing the fluid throughout the engine bay. It was a real mess and smelt like a bon-fire in a tyre yard!

I took it to a hydraulic specialist who said it would need a new pump and steering box and would cost about $1000 to fix with reco parts. I started to realize it wasn’t quite the bargain I first thought. I asked the guy if there were any other options and he said I could either go back to the good old days and just have heavy, manual steering or I could try filling the reservoir with a leak stopping fluid – a highly viscous substance similar to honey that clogs up all the gaps. Having experience the joys of manual steering on urban roads and multi-level carparks with my first car, I decided to give the fluid option a go.

To my surprise, this fluid slowed the leak considerably. With the problem much less annoying now, I put up with the occasional odor of fluid burning as it dripped on the exhaust, and the lovely spots on the garage floor. That was until my brother in-law, a farmer and hydraulic guru came to visit. He suggested we have a go at replacing the seals in the pump.

I had no previous experience with hydraulics, or seals so I had no idea if this was something we could pull off, or something that would result in about 0.001 ton of scrap for the metal man.

My brother in-law was confident and a very capable tinkerer, so we gave it a go. I found a workshop manual for the ute on the Internet which detailed the internal workings of the pump and box. We removed the pump and with the diagram as a guide pulled it apart. It contained 2 seals and a few o-rings. We took the pile of parts that once resembled a pump down to the hydraulics shop and got them to match the seals and o-rings. They were all standard sizes and were no trouble to match. They cost a grand total of $6!

Very excited, we hurried home, put it all back together and stuck it back in the ute.

To our surprise, it worked! Not a single leak from the pump. I couldn’t believe it. Using nothing more than handy-man tools, a diagram and the people I inherited through marriage, I had a $6 ‘reconditioned’ pump!

With the pump solved, we wondered if we could fix the box too. We had a look at the manual and it was complicated. Many parts were pressed together, and I didn’t have the tools to pry them apart. So we decided to leave it for another day. My brother in-law has a very well equipped shed, including a near lethal press, pullers and other specialized tools. We decided next time I visited his place I would remove the steering box from the ute, bring it with me and fix it at his place.

About 6 months later my family and I went to his place for Christmas. I pulled the steering box out of the ute (a story in itself) and took it with us. Not many people bring steering components with them to Christmas Tea - but I do.

After the festivities had settled down, we had a crack at the steering box. It wasn’t difficult to pull apart, but was fiddly. It was beginning to look like one of those adventures that end in the participants saying ‘why did we start this’ or ‘what were we thinking’. The kind of project where you have put everything back together but still have 2 bolts, a nut and a handful of bearings you don’t know what to do with. We were very careful and tried to think 2 moves ahead before touching anything. After about 2 hours we had located all the seals and o-rings.

We drove the 45 minutes to the next town – Horsham – that had a hydraulic supplier. Like before, we walked in with a bucket full of parts and asked them to match the seals. For about an hour they measured the shafts, measured the seals, scratched their heads, then measured some more. There were only 4 seals, but 2 of them where not a standard size. They needed to be ordered from Sydney - not normally a big deal, but over Christmas would take some time.

After about 4 days of out-staying our welcome, the parts arrived. Hoping we could still remember where everything went we put the steering box back together. It went together really easily. Better yet, we had no parts left over.

A few days later my family and I travelled back home and I put the box back in my ute. I hopped in, lovingly took one last look at the kids and nervously took it for a test run. There’s nothing like having the crucial part of your car’s steering and thus your life in the hands of your DIY project. I was really just hoping it stayed on the road. At this stage I didn’t care if it leaked or not.

I took it for a gentle hoon around the block and lived to tell the tale. Now I was getting excited.’ I wonder if it is leaking’. I popped the bonnet and like I had done so many times before, ran my finger along the steering box to gauge the severity of the leak. However, this time my finger was not covered in oil. In fact it was not covered in anything at all - the box was squeaky clean.

I took it for another hoon (this time a real hoon) and checked it again. Still clean. I couldn’t believe it. The whole thing was fixed! I rang and thanked my brother in-law. He was rapped too.

My initial quote to fix the system was $1000. My brother in-law and I fixed it ourselves for $48, about 8 hours work and no special tools other than a press. This all happened 16 months ago, and to this day neither the pump nor box leak at all. The ute really was a bargain after all!

The moral of the story - if you are going to buy crap off eBay check the skills of your wife's family first. Thanks Rodney!

Podcasts – the easiest way to stay on the bleeding edge of technology

2008-01-03T11:23:00.000+11:00

Like most serious I.T. professionals I find keeping abreast of technology a constant struggle. There are only so many hours in the day and balancing a full time job and a family makes finding time to read about and research new technology next to impossible.

That is until I discovered Podcasts.

For anyone who really hasn’t kept up to date, a podcast is recorded audio that can be downloaded from the net and played on a computer or a portable listening device such as an ipod, mp3 player or smartphone.

By far the best technology podcasts in my opinion are offered by the TWIT network. TWIT contains many different podcasts all hosted by Leo Laporte – a veteran technology broadcaster. There are 3 TWIT podcasts I listen to religiously;

This Week In Tech – TWIT’s weekly flagship and namesake podcast where a panel of experts discuss the weeks technology news. It generally focuses on the consumer end of technology concentrating on topics such as the iPhone, and Kindle, venture capital deals, the rise and rise of Google and Microsoft’s various legal battles.
Windows Weekly – a weekly podcast where Leo and Windows IT Pro Magazine editor Paul Thurrott discus the latest news from Microsoft. It generally focuses on consumer products such as Vista, Office, the Xbox and Windows Home Server giving little coverage of enterprise products.
Security Now – a weekly podcast discussing everything related to security with GRC founder and security and hard drive expert Steve Gibson. This is by far the most educational podcast I’ve come across - comparable to a university degree in security. Topics range from encryption algorithms, identity management and firewalls.

All the TWIT podcasts are very well produced with a sound analogous to a commercial radio station and are a pleasure to listen to.

Carl Franklin produces a very educational .NET podcast called .Net Rocks. Carl himself a .NET guru often interviews experts including many who developed the .NET platform at Microsoft, giving great insight into how to leverage its functionality. This podcast is also well produced with excellent audio quality, however I find Carl and his co-host painful to listen to. They have very strong accents and share a terrible sense of humour.

Hanselminutes is a podcast with I.T. evangelist Scott Hanselman. The topics are generally web development related such as how to mashup Google Earth or write apps for Facebook, but also cover more general topics like building a developer PC or setting up a home network. This podcast is not always of interest, ·but is one I listen to regularly.

All of these podcasts are about 1 hour in length and are released weekly. I listen to them on my iMate JAM smartphone. I find the best time to listen to them is in bed (I find it hard to fall asleep now without a podcast), driving and while running.

All of these podcasts can be subscribed to using RSS. I use Juice which uses the RSS feed to automatically download the latest episodes when they are available.

Before I discovered podcasts I was seriously considering leaving the I.T. industry. I have a young family and just couldn’t find the time required to maintain the standard of knowledge I expect of myself. I am a web developer, and it seems this segment of the industry has been reinvented in the past 3 years undergoing rapid change with the introduction of 3 versions of .NET, AJAX. and now Silverlight. No sooner have you invested a huge amount of time and remastered your craft when the next technology is released and you slip back to the bottom of that learning curve.

Podcasts have reduced the time it takes to get up to speed. You don’t have to make time to listen to them – instead you turn your downtime into the most productive part of your day.

How To Make an ironing board cupboard

2008-01-02T13:57:00.007+11:00

When I was young, my parents renovated a part of our house and had an ironing board cupboard installed in the wall. This was a cupboard recessed into the wall that housed an iron and an ironing board that would pivot from a the back of the cupboard from a vertical to a horizontal position. My mum was wrapped with this addition to the house as it meant she could quickly iron something without having to set everything up.

When my wife and I built our house I had wanted to install one too. But our tight budget did not allow us to spend the $450 or so that they cost. It really annoyed me that they were so expensive as there isn’t a lot to them – “I could make one myself” popped into my head every time I thought about it.

When one of our children pulled the iron off the board setup in the laundry and almost onto her head I decided it was time to see if I really could make one myself.

My mum’s version had a board that would simply pivot out on a hinge attached to the base of the board. This required about 1300mm clear space in front of the cupboard to allow room for the board to extend - then a bit more room if you wanted to be able to walk around it.

Our laundry does not have that much room so I needed a different design. Either a much smaller board, or one that could fold out sideways. A smaller board was not going to be practical, so I settled on a sideways, folding design.

Like most of my projects, I like to set myself some design constraints – a little challenge to make the project more interesting, and hopefully improve the quality of the result too. My constraint for this project was to make the cupboard as thin as possible – to be precise it wasn’t to protrude from the wall more than 20mm once installed. The wall is 90mm thick, so this was an overall width of 110mm. The iron is 90mm wide, so this was going to be a challenge.

Making the board hinge sideways was relatively easy. It just required a hinged frame to be made and attached to the ironing board. However, as the board is around 1400mm long, this would require a very long, skinny cupboard. I thought this would look stupid, so I decided the board itself needed to fold in the middle as well. This meant the cupboard only needed to be as wide as half the length of the board.

I took a standard ironing board removed the legs and cut it in half. I then welded a 20mm RHS frame for each half of the board and attached them snugly underneath each board. I then joined a piano hinge to each frame and riveted the 2 hinges together. This made a double hinged joint between the 2 frames, giving a full 180 degrees of travel and allowed the board to fold completely back on itself. 1 hinge would have only given about 120 degrees of travel.

Once the ironing board frame and hinging mechanisms were complete I built a timber cupboard for it all to sit in. This was a simple cupboard with a shelf for placing items like a lint brush, the water container for the iron, scissors, and the iron itself.

The iron after use is obviously quite hot. I was concerned that the iron might be hot enough to smoulder the pine sides or MDF doors of the cupboard, especially given there is only about 10mm clearance around the iron. So I attached ceramic tiles around the section of the shelf where the iron sits. Given the small clearance, I had to recess the tile inside the door. This means the iron is now completely surrounded by tiles when placed in the cupboard which are capable of safely absorbing its heat until it cools down.

My other concern was that you may forget to turn the iron off when placing it back in the cupboard. This would eventually cause a fire despite the tiles. So I purchased a plastic ‘jiffy’ box which was the exact width of the iron and placed a 10AMP, 240Volt lever switch in the top of the box. This box was then placed on the shelf where the iron sits and the switch was wired in series to a standard 3 pin socket to power the iron. Now when the iron is placed on the box, the switch is depressed and the power to the iron is cut. I also placed a light in the circuit that illuminated whenever this circuit was closed serving as a visual sign that the iron was on.

I was nervous about the insurance implications of hard wiring this home-made circuit to the house circuit. So I decided to place a 3 pin plug on the end of the circuit which would protrude through the wall and be plugged into a power point adjacent to the cupboard in the laundry wall. This means the entire ironing board circuit could be easily disconnected by simply unplugging it from the power point.

With the ironing board mechanism, cupboard and wiring complete, it was time to cut a hole in the laundry wall and install. I cut an appropriate sized hole in the plaster, remove 1 stud from the wall and inserted noggins in appropriate places. The cupboard was then simply slid into the hole and screwed to the noggins. Some timber ‘quad’ beading was placed around the edge of the cupboard and the whole thing was painted.

The whole system works really well. It has reduced the clutter in the laundry, made it easier to setup the iron and made it safer for the kids. The project probably cost around $70 including the board, but took about 8 days which was a lot longer than I expected. Most of this time was spent figuring out how to make it all work and fit within the constraints. I could probably now make another one in less than 2 days.

Backup your data to ‘The Cloud’

2008-01-02T13:43:00.001+11:00

A review of Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk

I’ve been hunting for a solution that would enable me to perform offsite backups of important information from my various home computers easily and economically. I have experimented with external hard drives but find it hard to remember to take the drive offsite after a backup and to bring it back again when I need to capture more data.

Also, I would like a solution that would enable me to access my files from any internet connected PC.
I was listening to a Security Now podcast from the TWIT Network that was talking about using a product called Jungle Disk with the Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service and it sounded like the very thing I was after.

Amazon S3 is a data storage service that allows you to store any amount of data securely online. It is extremely inexpensive with a cost of US 15 cents per GB stored per month and a bandwidth charge of US 10 cents per GB transferred in and US 18 cents per GB transferred out.

S3 utilises Amazon’s existing storage backbone used in Amazon’s own network which ensures it is fast, reliable and full of redundancy.

S3 has no user interface but instead uses a SOAP and REST API intended for integrating the service into other products. This is great for developers, but means the service is out of reach for the average home user. This is where JungleDisk comes in.

Jungle Disk is a tool that enables you to map a regular network drive to your Amazon S3 service. This allows you to interact with your storage just like any other drive on your computer. JungleDisk comes with a reasonably powerful backup solution enabling scheduled backups of nominated files and directories. If however you prefer to use your existing backup solution you can simply point it to the Jungle Disk mapped drive and have the data sent to the Cloud.

Jungle Disk has built in encryption allowing files to be encrypted before being sent to Amazon ensuring your data remains yours.

Jungle Disk is also very inexpensive – a 1 off $US20 fee entitles you to install the software on as many computers as you like linked to the one S3 account.

I have been using the service for a few weeks now and can’t fault it. The 2 products combine to create a solution that is easy to use, easy to integrate, and very cost effective. I highly recommend it.

How to access grey water when you've got a concrete house slab

2007-12-07T15:10:00.000+11:00

With Australia in the grip of the worst drought in history and Ballarat on yet another year of Stage 4 water restrictions I decided it was time to make use of the grey water produced by our house in an effort to keep the garden and lawn alive through summer.

We are a family of 6 – with 4 kids under 5. Keeping that many small kids in clean clothes means the washing machine is nearly always running. This is clearly the biggest water guzzler in our house using about 140 litres per load. The kids also share a bath once a day using another 70 litres, and my wife and I have a shower each contributing around 120 litres per day. All up this equates to 330 litres of water per day – surely enough to keep the garden looking green.

The problem with accessing this water is that our house is built on a concrete slab. All the plumbing runs under the house inside the slab. By the time the pipe emerges from the slab it has already been mixed with sewerage from the toilets – something I don’t particularly want to put on the garden!

Bath Water
There is only 1 waste pipe that is accessible from outside the house that has not been mixed with sewerage and by shear luck this happens to be the bath. The waste pipe from the bath discharges into the sewer via the ‘gully trap’ – an open, vertical vent in the sewer which is lower than the house but above the ground ensuring any backflow of sewerage caused by a blockage will spew out of it and not up through the showers and all over the bathroom floor!

The bath waste pipe joins the gully trap via a T- join approximately 20cms below ground level on the outside of the house. Tapping into this pipe to capture the bath water would be relatively easy. I purchased a PVC fitting that has a 50mm sleeve on one end, and a threaded 1inch hole on the other. The inside of the ‘T’ was not designed to be joined onto – you are meant to join to the outside of them. As such the inside is not a standard size. Using a heat gun I was able to flair the 50mm sleeve slightly so that I could jam it snuggly into the inside of the join where the bath met the gully trap.

I then threaded a 1 inch fitting into the other end of the PVC fitting to accommodate a poly pipe.

I originally experimented with gravity feeding the water out of the bath as the bath is slightly higher than most of the garden. This was very unsuccessful though as the bath drained very slowly leaving dirt and soap scum behind in the bath. Airlocks were also a big problem – requiring a siphon to be established before the water would drain.

After tweaking the gravity feed system for 12 months I realized it was a lost cause and decided to attach a pump instead. I purchased an inexpensive – yet very powerful pump on eBay. It is a 750w, 240volt, 65Litre/minute pump and only cost $70.

I purchased a plastic tub with lid that was large enough to accommodate the pump. I then dug a hole next to the gully trap and placed the plastic tub and pump in the hole. Being in a hole, the pump is lower than the bath allowing it to gravity feed from the bath to the pump to establish a ‘prime’.

I have built a ground level timber deck down the side of the house where the gully trap is. So the pump sits in its hole under the deck. This meant the tub didn’t need to be UV stabilized or very strong as it never sees sunlight or has any weight on it.

I then ran an extension lead in orange conduit under the deck from the pump to a near-by external power point .

This configuration worked really well. The pump is capable of draining the bath very quickly – quick enough to take all the dirt and scum with the water.

In order to turn the pump on and off, you had to run outside to the power point. This was a bit of a pain. So I purchased a $30 power point remote control from Dick Smith. This has a receiver that plugs into the pump and a transmitter that you can leave in the bathroom. This allows you to operate the pump from inside the house (or from anywhere with in about 20 metres of the pump).

We have now been using the bath pump system for over 12 months and it has worked flawlessly. The bath water alone is enough to keep about 100 square metres of lawn and about 60 plants looking really healthy right through summer.

Shower Water
The next challenge was to find a way to access the shower water. There was no hope of accessing the shower’s waste pipe before it joined the sewer so for about 12 months I thought a practical solution would not be possible.

But then one day whilst in the shower a solution popped into my head that was so obvious I was almost embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it earlier.

The shower in our main bathroom is next to the bath – the bath that I had previously connected to the pump. Separating the shower from the bath is a 40cm high tiled wall and the shower screen.

My idea was to place a small low voltage bilge pump in the shower and run a ¾ inch pipe between the tiled wall and the shower screen into the bath. I could then pump the water out of the shower into the bath and then from the bath onto the garden.

I tried many different pumps and none worked very well. I tried 2 different types of pond pumps but they both could not handle the soap scum and eventually burnt out. I also tried a cordless rechargeable pump, but this suffered a similar fate.

I eventually found on eBay a 12Volt bilge pump designed for a boat. It is designed to operate in slightly dirty conditions and as such had no problem with the soapy water. Better yet it was only $20!

I unscrewed the grill from the shower waste hole and replaced it with a standard sink plug to stop the water going down the drain. I then placed the bilge pump on top of the plug. The pipe from the pump goes under the show screen (which had to be raised slightly) and into the bath.

A wire was then run from a 12Volt transformer to the pump via a switch in the shower (in an area that doesn’t get wet).

When a person is using the shower they simply flick the switch to activate the pump. The pump is faster than the shower head so it doesn’t need to be on all the time. 2 or 3 20 second bursts of the pump is all that is needed to keep the water level below the top of the shower-base.

Once everyone has had their showers the bath pump can then be activated and the water pumped out onto the garden.

We have been using this system for 12 months now. With this new pump, the system works perfectly. The extra water it provides has made an unbelievable difference to the garden and was well worth the effort.

Washing Machine

The final and biggest water using item in the house is the washing machine. Unfortunately there is no clever way that I can think of to access its water from the outside of the house without running messy pipes through the doors or windows.

So, to many people's shock, I drilled a hole through the brick wall and ran my own pipe! I drilled a 1 inch hole through the brick, the plaster and then through the bottom of the laundry trough cupboard to accommodate a poly pipe. I then connected the discharge pipe from the washing machine to my pipe.

This worked a treat. The washing machine pump was more than powerful enough to pump water 20 metres or so to our front lawn/garden. The only problem was that after the washing machine has drained once, the pipe remains full of water. When the machine begins to fill with water a subsequent time, a siphon exists in the pipe and the water is sucked from the washing machine before it is ready to be drained. This was fixed by adding a simple 'breather' hose in the pipe which allowed air to enter the pipe to break the suction.

Assuming we will always be allowed to wash our clothes and have a shower, our garden is now basically drought proof. While there was a lot of trial and error and a lot of ideas that didn't work, the whole effort was well worth it. We only use the system from November to March which is about 20 weeks. At 330 Litres/day, this equates to over 47,000 litres of water that is now available to our garden each summer that would have otherwise gone down the drain! The parts for the systems I've described above only cost around $300 and even if it only lasts 5 years, that equates to less than 0.1 cents for each litre of grey water. Quite a good investment!

How to extend a kid's swing set to accomodate an extra swing

2007-12-04T21:29:00.000+11:00

Like every Australian household with young kids, a Hills swing set takes pride of place in our backyard. We chose the standard model consisting of a normal swing, roman rings and a sea-saw swing. This seemed like the perfect configuration for our then 1 child family. When our second child came along, we added a slide that attaches to the side of the swing frame and replaced the roman rings with a second normal swing.

With the arrival of our third child, and no room to add any more swings it was starting to look like it might have to be upgraded to a bigger model.

But reluctant to part with the slightly small, but perfectly fine centre-piece of our backyard, I thought there must be a way to make room for our youngest toddler.

The horizontal beam that supports the swings is made from RHS (rectangular hollow section). Apart from some bolts that intersect it – this beam is completely hollow. After a brief inspection, it was obvious that a slightly smaller, snug-fitting RHS beam could be slid inside the swing’s beam to make it longer and accommodate an extra swing.

I purchased a 1.5 meter length of RHS that would fit tightly inside the swing’s beam. I removed the bolts that fasten the legs to the beam and inserted the RHS. The RHS is now covering the bolt holes from the inside of the beam so they need to be drilled through. Once that was complete, the bolts could be re-inserted securing the swings legs, beam and extension.

After some paint, a toddlers swing was attached to the beam and a very excited toddler placed in the swing.

The extension works well. It would only be suitable for toddlers as I don’t think it could handle the forces exerted by an older child and they would possibly collide with the legs of the swing – but it more than does the job for now. The photo below shows the extension and the umbrellas I mounted on top of the swing for shade. Read about the umbrella project.

How to shade a kid's swing set with a market umbrella

2007-12-04T21:23:00.000+11:00

It doesn’t seem to matter how big a stand you have on the bottom of your market umbrella, it will still manage to blow over and break the first time it is subjected to anything more than a slight breeze.

I was given a market umbrella for Christmas one year and despite being mounted in a reasonably heavy stand, by February I had repaired it at least 3 times.

Fearing it would not survive another topple, I hunted around the backyard for a more solid fixture to mount it on.

It was a typical hot summer’s day – too hot for the kids to venture outside. They were cooped up in the house for about the 4th day in a row - board and driving my wife nuts.

As I scanned the back-yard for something solid, I remembered telling the kids earlier that day it was too hot to play on the swing. Then it hit me… “Swings are solid” I thought to myself excitedly as I realised I could kill 2 birds with 1 stone.

I set off to the shed with the umbrella and some scrap steal and welded up a bracket to hold the umbrella on top of the swing.

The result was quite good. I designed the bracket to mount in the centre of the horizontal beam of the swing. It had two mounting holes which aligned with the bolts that supported the centre swing. Installation is as simple as removing the nuts for the centre swing, slipping the bracket over the bolts and reinstalling the nuts.

The umbrella then slides into a piece of steel pipe attached to the bracket.

The umbrella provided a lot of shade to the centre swing, and adequate shade to the side swings during the middle of the day when the sun is directly over head.

I was happy with the result and so were the kids. It stopped the umbrella blowing over all the time, and provided some shade for the kids to play on the swing.

About 3 months later, I extended the swing frame and mounted an extra swing to cater for the newest arrival to our family. This had made the swing wider, and 1 umbrella was no longer providing enough shade. In addition, the swing frame has a slide mounted on the side which receives no shade at all.

Time to mount a second umbrella.

My main, self imposed constraint in making the mounting brackets was not to modify the swing frame at all. My brackets had to align with the existing, factory set holes and bolts already present in the swing frame.

For this reason, the bracket I made for the single umbrella design could not be used in the 2 umbrella configuration.

I designed 2 new brackets that mount near the edges of the swing frame utilizing the existing bolts that join the legs to the horizontal beam.

The 2 umbrella version provides shade to all the swings, including the extension and the slide. The umbrellas overlap slightly in the middle to provide adequate shade to the middle swing. This results in 1 umbrella being higher than the other.