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* * LOOP SPACERS * *
There's one important detail I forgot to post earlier, so I'm apending it to this post...
I read that the performance of the boreholes is improved by keeping the 'down-the-hole' and 'returning' pipes separated as much as possible. There is a commercial product that is available that does an excellent job I am sure. But I made my own out of thin-wall irrigation tubing I had laying around and some bicycle tubes cut into strips. The local bike store most likely has a barrel filled with dead inner tubes, just waiting for you to come get some.
I put the spacers on the loop pipe at intervals of 3 to 5 feet.
In the beginning of this project, I bought 100 feet of thinwall 1/2 inch irrigation tube for $10. I soon realized that it would be crushed by the weight of the earth, so I didn't use it, and I had 'munged it up' enough that I couldn't take it back either. But it did turn out to be very useful for tubing spacers.
In the picture at the top are some spacers I cut from the plastic tubing. Since the holes varied in size, I cut a large number all at once, but varying in length from 4 to 7 inches, to fit various situations.
The photo on the bottom shows some strips of bike tires I cut into strips to use for tying the spacer-tubes onto the poly pipe loops.
I looped the tire strip around the poly pipe as shown in the photo below:
The photo above show how I passed the tire strip ends through the small tube.
And tied the free ends around the other leg of the poly pipe loop as shown in the photo below.
The photo above shows the spacerin place, doing its job of keeping the poly loop pipes spread apart. One nice thing about the thinwalled irrigation pipe is that if I mis-calculated the width of the borehole and put in a spacer that was too big, the thin-walled tubing would collapse a bit.
Toward the end of this phase of the project, I developed an alternate method which may be more appealing, and that was to make a wire hook out of coat hanger wire to be used with rubber bands cut from a fat tire bike tube. I tried a mountain bike sized tube for making rubber bands, even cutting them at a diagonal, and they were just a little bit short. I didn't try it, but I think that a 'fat-tire' innertube would be just right.
Upper picture shows the hook, with an orange ribbon attached to aid visibility, the tube spacer, and a diagonal-cut rubber band.
As shown in the bottom pic,the rubber band would be slipped over one leg of the loop, then the wire hook would be pushed through the spacer tube, hooking the rubber band. Then the hooked rubber band end would be pulled through the tube and slipped over the remaining leg of the loop. Several of these would be put over the loop, then slid into place at desired intervals.
I tried this method toward the end of the hole drilling phase, and it was just about as fast as the tying method, using cut strips, and I could see that with a bit of practice, the new method would go faster than tying.
Regards
-AC_Hacker
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