Water cooler style auto top up

Heres a couple of short videos showing my water cooler-style auto top up


Bottle Empty


Inserting Full Bottle

I didnt think to pull out the base to show you, but it is just one of the bottles I used to use for my window farm. I cut off the top of a standard 5-gallon water bottle (I drilled a 1-inch hole near the top, then used tin snips, finishing the edge with some 1/4-inch tubing sliced so it could fit over the raw edge of the plastic). Since I need water to flow in and out of the base, I drilled additional 1-inch holes near the bottom. If you drill too fast, the plastic can rip (why would I know this...).

Heres a picture showing what the 5-gallon bottle looks like with the lid snipped off (I originally did this to create a fish tank for my aquaponics window farm system):

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Auto Top Up

The Dial Float Valve

Murray Hallam shows a cool doo-hicky for automatically topping up a tank in his video Aquaponcs: The First 12 Months. Looked like an old-fashioned toilet bulb, but mounted differently from a toilet bulb.

I went to my local hardware stores and failed to find anything that seemed to work "right." So I came up with my 5-gallon water-cooler approach to keeping my tank full.

Except that its high summer now. Im having to fill the 5-gallon jug every couple of days, instead of once a week or so. Its still less water than I would use to water this many plants in a conventional garden, but its irritating.

Then tonight I was talking to my Mom on the phone. Turns out the float valve Murray had in his video is a standard component in evaporative coolers (aka swamp coolers). The reason Id been unable to find the piece is that swamp coolers dont work in Virginia because water doesnt evaporate terribly well in Virginias humidity. Therefore big hardware stores in Virginia dont stock parts for evaporative coolers. They dont even let people in Virginia (and presumably other humid regions) find these parts on the websites, since it isnt a part they bother stocking in their online shipping depots.

Gah!!!

Now that I know what to call the thing, I could order one on eBay. Sweetness. Even better, my Mom is willing to jot down to her local hardware store and pick one up for me. In turn, shes asked me for a bag of my bacteria-impregnated rocks, to help get her aquaponics system started. Kind of like how neighbors of yore used to lend each other a cup of sourdough starter.

So therell be one "Dial Evaporative Cooler 1/4" Brass Float valve " headed from Utah to Virginia, and a pint of damp hydroton headed from Virginia to Utah.

In the mean time, you now know what to look for on eBay, should you want to set up such an auto top-off system for yourself.

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