Walking with water
I’ll spare you, dear reader, from the litany of 4 letter words currently flying around my lab.
This was originally supposed to be a light hearted post about the amusement I found testing the seal in my beds. I just put the finishing touch on 5 {censored] paragraphs, and when I tried to import a copy of the thumbnail (that was already attached to the website) into the message body, so I could call it done, I was rewarded by an “out of memory” message in my browser, which conveniently dumped all of my work with no hint of a backup stored on this [censored] site or in within the confines of my browser’s [censored] “back” button.
The part that really cheeses me off about this is that its 2022, and I honestly thought that technology had advanced to the point where I could do something as [censored] simple as type a quick update blog post, off the top of my head, without needing to journal it all out in an offline text file, incase the internet farts and I lose another [censored] hour+ of work.
{censored] unreliable {censored] piece of [censored] [censored] [censored].
OK, Better!
Now that I got that out of my system, lets get something a little more productive put to paper (so to speak)
Yesterday I mounted and caulked the elbows to the downspouts, and today, once they had cured, I brought them out to the balcony, filled them with water and let them sit for a few hours in order to test the seals. They all passed!
Incidentally, when I was filling the beds I found out that they both will hold approximately 1.5L before running out the drainage hole, when left flat/horizontal. That will be a good number to remember once the system is up and running, as the juice jug I am going to be using as the system’s reservoir holds 4L meaning I’m only going to have 1L of reserve fluid in the jug, when the system is running. I may have to top up the reservoir immediately after each time I refresh the fluid, so there is more to circulate, once the beds have been primed. (I don’t know how much of the pump will be submerged with only 1L of fluid remaining)
Once I was sure that I had no leaks in the aulk came the real fun… trying to empty the downspouts.
Instead of just dumping them onto my balcony floor, I thought I’d pour the water into one of the pots on the table.
Amazingly, I was able to grab, pivot and move to the table without spilling a drop.
Then, with a belly full of over-confidence I went back for the second bed… and simply by picking up I had generated a wave in the downspout which was racing back and forth down the 5 foot length, thowing water out of the ends every time the wave crashed into the elbows. I have a new appreciation for the challenge on the show Canada’s Worst Driver where there was an open water tank mounted on the roof of the car, and the driver was trying to get from point A to Point B without spilling any of it.
