search

AguaClara / float_valve

High Flow Float Valve
0 stars 0 forks source link

More design questions #6

Closed FelixYuHengYang closed 6 years ago

FelixYuHengYang commented 6 years ago

Does water necessarily have to come out of the bottom? Will we need to install weights so that the float valve doesn't ever get stuck?

FelixYuHengYang commented 6 years ago

We were thinking that we could avoid using a T at the bottom and instead use that part of the pipe below the holes as a column to hold weight. This would both serve as a weight and avoid using a T that is pretty expensive at that scale.

eak24 commented 6 years ago

I like this idea! however, if you want to maximize the travel of the pipe, then the pipe shouldn't have much of a dead zone. Maybe you could just put a cap in the end and throw some biggish rocks down? That way you could still drill holes all the way to the bottom and water flows around the rocks to get out... No need to have a tee at the bottom. Also no need to have a tee for the float... depending on what you calculate for a required volume for that, you could maybe just use a 6" ND hole saw and pass a 6" pipe all the way through (I know accessories can get expensive at these sizes!)

FelixYuHengYang commented 6 years ago

Okay we will go with cap and hole idea as well as no T for the top part of the float. Another question... How did you determine the hole pattern in the slider pipe?

FelixYuHengYang commented 6 years ago

When you get to that plant could you mesaure what is the height at which the center of inlet pipe enters the tank measured from the bottom of the tank?

eak24 commented 6 years ago

I did not spend any time in thinking about the hole pattern. My two observations:

  1. radially symmetric holes are good... they aren't inclined to tilt the sliding pipe to one side or the other
  2. you want a gradual increase/decrease. Make sure that the "sliding window" of the inlet pipe tee doesn't expose large swings in flow rate. It will to some degree, unless you always space holes at a factor's spacing away from another, where the "factor" is a factor of the total sliding window height... this makes more sense visually. Such that as one hole closes, the other opens, so that one "completes" the other.

I can measure that when I get there!