Martin comes up with an ingenious solution to washing kit post dive.
Here’s a weekend project – making a kit rinser! Putting it together takes 15mins, the hard part was working out the materials required…Materials:
- Water butt, £19.99 (B&Q)
- 1/2″ high pressure ball valve part 2, £5.98
- ball float, £1.98
- 1/2″ rubber washers (they don’t come with the ball valve, grrr), £1.28
- 1/2″ threaded tap connecter (blue part in picture for connecting a garden hose to an outside water tap), £1
- 1/2″ water stop connector (not required if you already have a garden hose), £1
- Garden hose.
Method:
- Drill hole in side of water butt*,
- Bend float arm so it isn’t right in the middle of the water butt,
- Assemble everything
- Make tube from old plastic bag and tape to outflow of the valve, to stop the running water noise during operation!
- Connect float valve to mains water using garden hose (not shown)
- Connect a length of old hose onto the water butt outflow tap and route to drain (not shown).
* Buy a suitable drill bit! – I used a wood bit which chewed a large hole in the water butt, although fortunately not so large that the washer didn’t cover the mess.
Operation:
- Check you aren’t on a water meter (you could always use the waste water to irrigate the garden!)
- Fill with SCUBA kit
- Turn on mains water
- Open the waterbutt outflow tap to drain water slowly out (float valve keeps the system nicely topped up).