Comment

Comment by Claudio B. Maxwell-Merrill on April 20, 2012 at 8:30am

Hola Elizabeth,

With this Bell siphon design I found that it had  to many variables to balance out. You had to use Plumber PVC glue.  In some cases if it did not work the first time, I would have to take it apart trial and error style. One of the variables  was the plastic tube and its roll to break the siphon at a predetermined height. I could get a similar result boring a opening at the bottom of the bell siphon itself. I scratched the tube and went with a more practical Bell siphon design one that I could easily take apart and tinker with. However in the research phase this was a useful video to me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJctwA54Cj0

One consideration to note:

I found that if you have too large of a drain pipe opening. The pump can’t fill up fast enough and  it just simply drains. I used the mouth piece of water bottles as a funnels to reduce the water intake and also to give the geometrical frame work  for the siphon to initiate. This created a good water supply to water drained ratio.

The cool thing is to reduce the siphon time frequency I just had to add another funnel in one of my detachable rubber elbows. For me the trick was to achieve a good balance with all the bell siphon and pump components and it was hard to achieve that without spending a lot of time and recourses Taking it apart and putting it back together.

Hope this helped it was a lot of fun

Claudio

Comment by Elizabeth on April 20, 2012 at 6:31am

Hi Claudio.  How far down into the 1 3/8 PVC drain pipe does your plastic tube penetrate?  I can't get my siphons to work properly and I think this is why.

Thanks,  Elizabeth