A week ago, I spent the day in the garage doing some woodworking. I was using the table saw, miter saw and router table, creating a lot of dust. For my health, I hooked up the shop vac to the tools to collect the saw dust.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t satisfied with the results. The brand new filter in my shop vac quickly filled with fine sawdust. As soon as that happens, the suction drops off dramatically.
After a little bit of research online, I built a cyclone dust separator:
This contraption sits inline with the shop vac removes most of the sawdust and wood chips before they reach the vacuum’s tub or filter. It cost about $25 to build and despite my careless engineering and construction it works perfectly!
A couple of days ago, a friend and I were talking about putting extra weight in our pickup truck beds for added traction for winter driving. I’ve usually put a few hundred pounds of concrete blocks back there, but the problem is storing those blocks when not in use. I have to carry them out to the shed, which isn’t fun.
We came up with the idea of using ice, since it packs a fair amount of weight into a small space, it’s easy to load (use a hose), requires no room to store, and is even easier to unload (it just melts when it warms up).
One way that would probably work would be a use a tarp or piece of plastic sheet to trap some water in the bed and let it freeze in place. I didn’t have any handy, nor could I think of an easy way to keep it in a small space, so I used another approach.
I had a stack of 5 gallon buckets that kitty litter came in, so I filled them with water and let them sit for a couple of days. In about two days (around 10 degrees Fahrenheit outside) they were frozen solid. I turned them over and without too much trouble the ice slid out of the buckets. The picture above shows 7 buckets worth, which is around 300 pounds. Over the axle would be most effective, but the front of the bed works too, and leaves me more useful room in the bed.
For several years we’ve been buying the 18-gallon Sterilite plastic storage totes. They’ve offered the same grey tubs (item #1815) for years, and we’ve bought dozens of them. They sell for around $4 and are roughly 24 inches long, 18 inches wide, and exactly 15-3/8 inches tall. Because of this de facto standardization, I’ve built wooden shelves in my garage, in the basement and in most of our closets specifically sized for these tubs, with 16 inch spacing between the shelves for optimal storage efficiency. Almost everything we store is in these tubs.
About a week ago, I bought a bunch more since we’re doing some organizing. Tonight I went to put a tub of out-of-season clothes on one of the shelves and got a nasty surprise: the tubs have been slightly redesigned and are 3/4 of an inch taller. The lid is identical to the old model, and the stated capacity is still 18 gallons, but it’s now taller than my shelves. D’oh…
I’ve got a lot of shelves built for these tubs, probably about 40 tubs of storage capacity. My choices are to take the new tubs back and HOPE to find some (read: a lifetime supply) of the old ones, or do a ton of shelf rebuilding. I checked on Walmart’s website, and there are still some in stock, but not within 50 miles. Shipping is a possibility, but it’s a little pricey.
I guess there is a third choice: a grassroots effort to get Sterilite to return to the old design. Hopefully this inconsequential blog post, along with the nearly dozen people who will likely read it, will do the trick…
Just in time for fall… here’s the PVC water gun I designed and built:
It’s powered by air pressure, which is created by the water pressure in the garden hose. It cost about $10-12 to build. Full instructions are available on the project page.
The good news is, this time of year, some of the parts are on clearance at the home improvement stores. Build one today, and be ready for the jack-o-lantern smashing kids this Halloween!
While it’s not the most involved or most clever thing I’ve ever built, I made a cabinet in my garage for holding my power tool battery chargers. It’s really helping to declutter my workbench. Take a look at the project page.
We like to take our kids camping in our popup, but one problem I hadn’t solved yet was the lack of a night light. Evan likes to have one, and it’s nice to be able to see a little bit when sharing a “room” with kids. What I did was modify an existing light in the camper to add a night light feature.
Once I figured out what to do, it was a fairly easy project. Check out the project page for more information.
Dusty had the good fortune to find a Peg Perego Power Pull ride-on tractor on Craigslist recently. The price was right, but unsurprisingly, it needed a little work. We found a new battery for a good price, but there were also some cracks in the chassis. Both the front end and rear ends have succumbed to the impacts a novice driver is likely to administer.
In only an hour, I built a PVC frame to reinforce and repair the chassis. Since the back end was toast, the new frame also provides sort of a hitch as well. Visit the project page to read more.
This week I finished the interior of the playhouse. I added a loft, ladder, bench and toy box. The upstairs is a big hit with the kids, and there’s plenty of room inside for playing and storing toys.
Since it’s much cheaper to write about a previous project than to undertake a new one, I finally got around to posting details about the playhouse I built last summer. Take a look at the Playhouse page.
With the current weather, energy prices and economic climate, I’ve been looking for some ways to save on heating costs this winter. Everyone has written about saving money by lowering your thermostat, putting on a sweater, etc. but we’ve already done that, so I wanted to take a different approach. We have lots of items in our houses that generate heat, so I wanted to focus on keeping and using that heat, thereby reducing the amount of gas or electricity used by the furnace.
I like to be somewhat scientific with experiments like these, but I don’t have all the required equipment, and it’s hard to reproduce results with variables like the weather, so you’ll have to settle for anecdotal research and a little bit napkin-quality math.
The first thing I did was put that clear plastic sheeting on the windows. Our son’s room has two exterior walls and is the farthest room from the heater, so we have trouble keeping it warm. Right before putting up the barrier, it was 25 degrees (Fahrenheit) outside, the furnace thermostat was set on 68, and it was 60 in the room with the door shut. After installation, it was about 63 degrees in the room (after leaving time for the temperature to settle).
The next thing I did was address the heat lost when taking a shower. I haven’t measured my specific shower, but according to my research, a typical shower uses 30 gallons of water at 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). That means every morning 30 gallons of hot water goes down the drain. What I do now is leave the exhaust fan off and the drain plugged. After I’m done with my routine I open the bathroom door and don’t drain the water until it cools to room temperature. If you’ll settle for some highly simplified calculations and assumptions, and if I remember what my high school physics class taught me about specific heat, we should be able to calculate how much energy we’re talking about. Those thirty gallons of water, cooling from 104 down to 68 degrees Fahrenheit (which is a drop of 20 degrees Celsius) release 9507 kilojoules into the room. That’s 2.64 kilowatt hours, or the equivalent of running a 1500 watt space heater for an hour and 45 minutes. At ten cents per kilowatt of electricity, that would equate to $.26 per shower. By the way, if anyone cares to corroborate or discredit my math, please feel free. Like I said, there’s some gross over-simplification, but the point is we’re keeping that heat in the house instead of sending it down the drain. In practice, the thermometer in the bedroom raises about 4 degrees after a shower.
The next approach took just a little bit of work, but I’m happy to have done it. The local Ace Hardware sells a device called a dryer vent diverter for just $7. It lets you vent your dryer into the laundry room instead of outside, and can be switched back and forth quickly. Our dryer is electric and located in our cold basement, so this device has worked great. A couple of things to keep in mind – NEVER use one of these with a gas dryer, and be warned that they are against code in some places. I ran a load of laundry as a test, and just one load through the dryer raised temperature in our 600 square foot basement from 58 degrees to 62 degrees, not to mention keeping the laundry room itself nice and toasty. From my research, electric dryers use around 4 kilowatt-hours per load, and most of that is heat being pumped outside. Additionally, since the dryer draws its air from inside the house and vents outside by default, every unit of air vented outside creates negative pressure in the house and needs to be replaced by sucking frigid outdoor air into the house through any gap in the house. So, if the air is dry and cold in your house, keeping that nice warm humid air inside works out great.
I’ll be looking for some more ideas, but so far I think I’ve captured the big ones.
DIY cyclone dust separator for shop vac
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