Last year’s evapotrons got rid of a lot of grey water, on the order of 175 gallons. Good, but I think the design suffered from the Arduino (from my code, anyway). The machine crashed a lot and got into weird loops, so the control devices I built ended up leaving the pump not running for chunks of time.

New attempt: we’ll just let the pumps run all the time. They’re not loud, and they don’t draw all that much power (about 25w each). No Arduino.

Also we realized that without the Arduino, the evaporation towers can sit in a single kiddie pool (we don’t need the two-stage mechanism we had last year). That means each tower can be made of deer wire and rebar. Here’s the structure:

Image

In the image, you can see the deer wire formed in a 7′ tall, 36″ diameter cylinder.  At three equilateral points, a piece of 8′ rebar will be fixed to the deer wire to give it more vertical rigidity. The cylinder will be wrapped in burlap.

evap-tower-detail

The rebar comes out of the cylinder at the top. From each rebar top, we’ll fix a line of webbing down to the truck, kind of like the diagram below.

photo

Last year we used a strap of webbing wrapped around the truck to anchor the evapotron to the truck. This year, we’ll have 3 straps around the truck. Each evapotron will attach to the straps by 3 guy-ropes: one toward the center, and two to the front or rear corners. The guy ropes are 1000-lbs test ratcheted tie-downs, so I think they’ll hold fine. The guy-ropes also provide a way to level the top of the evapotron, which turns out to be Very Important.

We’ve also improved the water distribution mechanism on top of the saucer. Note the PVC is all fitted and glued.

evap-top-testUnderneath the saucer, the PVC attaches to a simple hose that drops to the pump sitting in the kiddie pool. No Arduino, though I may yet add an Arduino to drive some blinkies to show off the evapotrons. More to come.