Grid Runner Adventures

Every invention is the effect of a need. The portable solar water heater was brought on by a need (or a want I haven’t figured that out yet) to have warm/hot water on my Caneoing the inside passage trip spring 2009.

I started out with 20 ft of 1/4 inch copper tubing. You can get these very cheaply from a fridge water kit. What you do is grab a hold of the last 8 inches or so and start wrapping it around a circular object laying flat on the table/workbench. Keep on going until you reach the end.

Once you have the coil ready to go, you are set to take measurements for your tray. I purchased a sheet of polystyrene from lowes for

13 dollars when I built my previous solar collector so I had this laying around for use on this project as well. You need to measure the thickness of your wood and the foam board factored in to get total height /width of the tray you will be making. Inside dimensions need not be any more then what the copper coil will fit into. Use a spade bit large enough for the copper tubing to fit through and measure where the tail ends of the copper coil will fall through and drill these spots out.

You are now ready to paint the tray flat black (do not use any

high gloss here) so just coat it up and let it dry. while you are waiting for this to dry you can move onto the fun part – Carbon Blacking! To accomplish this I built a popcan stove. In the stove I am burning 91% iso alcohol to create a carbon soot on the copper coil. [caption id="attachment_148" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Tall Flame!"][/caption]

That is pretty much all that is required to do carbon blacking! no expensive equipment required. The next item on the bill is the collector array. this cost 2-4 dollars for a roll of 10 inch sheet metal flashing from lowes.

so without further hesitation…
With all 4 collector panels finished all i had to do was drill holes and pop rivet brass hinges to them and screw the hinges onto the collector tray.

Some notes that I did not document steps on:
I used a lexan sheet instead of glass for this unit because it is for portable use. I did not want to worry about breaking glass on the trail/sea. This unit is ready for testing at this point.

I will be powering this collector with a solar powered water pump from www.harborfreight.com as far as water storage.. I have my eye’s set on a pop up ice chest I found online. This was a really fun project and I cannot wait to try it out in real world conditions!

How I made a solar water collector.

Air powered water pump built from plants in my back yard.

This is my first attempt at making an air powered water pump. The basic principal behind a geyser pump is, if you submerge a tube into water, there is a column of water inside the tube. If you then pump air and form a bubble in the tube, that bubble of air will cause the water column to rise until the air can escape. Also the rising bubble creates suction and sucks more water up the column for the next charge. What I have just described is basically an air lift pump where lots of little bubbles cause the water to rise.

To make it a geyser pump you have to figure out a way to use one big bubble instead of hundreds of little bubbles.

This is the flow of water in a geyser pump. What you are not seeing is the interior of the geyser pump’s bottom. Imagine there are two cups one upside down inside the top one as well as the smaller cup being smaller diameter of the upper cup. The tube that the water flows through also goes straight through both cups.

here is a rendering of the internals of a geyser pump. Compressed air is introduced into the outer bell which pushes the water out of the bell. as it pushes the water down to the bottom of the bell it finds an escape route through the hole in the water tube and then creates a big bubble that pushes all the water up and out.

My first introduction to Aquaponics.

I would like to take the oportunity to thank you all for visiting my website and stay tuned as I will be updating the site with progress torwards various adventures!

Also please check out the how-to’s section!