This past weekend, my wife, 18-month-old daughter, and I went over to my Dad’s house. One of my brothers happened to be over there at the time too.
My dad wanted to put up a swing in the yard for the little girl, and took a look at a toddler swing at the store. His complaint wasn’t that it was over-priced, but that it was such a fancy, new-fangled thing, with seat-belts and straps in all directions. He thought it would be easier just to make a simple swing.
So, my Dad, brother, and I took a 5-gallon bucket, cut it to the shape of a toddler swing, ran a rope through it, and hung it from a tree.
The little girl swung in it for about an hour and a half. She typically never goes on any of the swings at the park for more than ten minutes!
I didn’t get a chance to document making that swing, since I didn’t have my camera with me. However, last night I made a second bucket swing to hang in my back yard. I took photos to show how I made it and then made a YouTube video from that as well.
Here’s the video for you.
I have a nice long post about all this on my personal blog. Visit over there if you want the long story and “how-to” directions.
I also made a technical drawing showing how to build the bucket swing. I have that posted HERE. I drew it up to fit one 8.5×11″ sheet of paper, so you can print it out and take it out to your garage or workshop for when you make your bucket swing.
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Last fall, forum user Menaus2 installed a solar hot air panel on one of his rental properties. He didn’t have a lot of width to play with, so he decided to make the solar panel taller to increase the amount of collector area.
The construction is fairly straight forward. The sides are made of 2×8s. Inside the 2×8s is a layer of polyiso rigid foam insulation.
The top and bottom both have a 4″ duct hole cut in them for the air to flow through. The area was later painted black along with everything else.
Next, two layers of aluminum screen were mounted into the collector to absorb the heat and transfer it to the air moving through the panel.
Lastly, the collector is sealed off with a layer of polycarbonate.
To improve the efficiency of the collector, Menaus added a small squirrel cage fan similar to a bathroom ventblower fan. It is controlled by a plug in thermostat that is commonly used in greenhouse type applications.
Over the winter, Menaus said that on a sunny day the solar collector would raise the temperature of the kitchen pretty consistently around 5 degrees fahrenheit.
We finally got some snow this year and I was able to use the snow blower attachment for the tractor. For a while now its been sitting in the garage with its shiny new chains patiently waiting for the snow to arrive. When it finally came it came down about 5-6″ thick and pretty fluffy. It was pretty ideal testing conditions, and a common amount of accumulation for my area.
As you can see from the video, the blower works great so far. I was a little worried about it only being a single stage, but it handled this snowfall and a few others since without any problems. I can also say it is much faster than my 7hp 27″ John Deere walk behind, and it is a heck of a lot more fun to zip around on.
Of course, there are some issues to deal with. At the end of the snowblowing my batteries had a thin layer of snow on top of them. This isn’t a big deal, but my chargers inside the box on the tractor also had a layer of snow on them. That is a problem that will need to be fixed. So I’ll be making a cover for the box.
Almost ironically, the chargers in the back of the mower which are under the fenders not horribly far from the wheels didn’t have any snow on them or anywhere near them. That is where I had expected to have problems. I was happy to see that was not the case.
In part one, we cut out the concrete floor where we needed to run the drain tile. Then, we removed the concrete and dug down to make a trench for the drain tile to sit in.
The next step was to put down some rock. This allows water to more freely flow around and get to the drain tile quicker. We ended up using some ~1″ riverstone as that was the closest thing we could find at the home improvement store and we didn’t need a ton.
After a layer of stone is down, we laid the drain tile down into the trench. It was cut to length from a 100 foot roll and connected up to the sump.
To keep that area around the drain tile free flowing, we needed to add more rocks on the sides of the tile and on top of it. Again this is so that the water can more easily get to the drain tile to move it away from the house.
With the additional rock on top of the drain tile, it is time to put plastic over the top. This will stop the concrete from seeping down into the rock we just put down.
The last step is to pour the concrete and smooth it all out.
The results from doing this work have been very good so far. The basement humidity is usually around 80% without the dehumidifier running. It has been quite rainy here lately, enough to keep everything outside wet, and the basement humidity is a wonderful non-musty 60%. I’m hoping the dehumidifer will no longer be needed at all and that I can stop it from sucking down 1-2 kWh of electricity every day in summer. The energy savings are only augmeted by the health issues that can arise from having a musty basement that gives a perfect environment for mold and dust mites to live.
Even before purchasing my house, I knew that there were water issues with the basement. Being built in the late 1800s, it doesn’t have any drain tile to help remove water from around the house. It did already have a sump and a pump. However, the only water that got to the sump had to drain through the soil (later found to be mostly clay) to it and then it could be pumped out. This issue lead to the problem of a continually very moist basement. It had that unpleasant musty smell if the dehumidifier wasn’t running during summer. In winter things would be fine, but in spring I’d have small puddles in the basement as well as when ever we got a good downpour or a few days of good steady rain. The water did not come through the walls, but rather up from cracks in the floor.
To fix the problem, we needed to add some drain tile under the concrete floor and plumb it to the sump. We started with a concrete saw and made two cuts where the sides of the trough would be for the drain tile to be laid down. You can rent a concrete saw at a tool rental place for a reasonable price.
We made the cuts run to the problem areas of the basement where water would seep through the floor. The proper way to do it is actually to run drain tile around the entire exterior wall. However, the water problem wasn’t that bad so we decided to take this shorter and easier route.
The next step was done with another rented tool, an electric hammer / jack hammer. We had started trying to break up the concrete with a sledge hammer but it just wasn’t working well for us. As you can see the sharper corners broke off which just makes for more work later on. Renting the jack hammer was also cheap and made the job go much quicker.
After getting all the concrete hauled out of the basement, it was time to dig down and create a trench where the drain tile could be laid down. A trenching shovel came in quite handy here (long and narrow), but we still ran into a lot of clay which is a bear to dig through. Not only that, but after its dug up you still have to haul it out of the basement.
For more information see the forum thread about the project.
