Automatic drainpipe cleaner
Background
One rainy day in 2017 I was sitting in a terrace. I was bored. Couple of days earlier I was cleaned up our drainpipes.
There I was bored and thinking about how nasty job it is to clean up the drainpipes. I saw water coming out of the drainpipe and then I got an idea!
Technical details
Automatic drainpipe cleaner consists of the following four main parts:
- Water wheel - Turns water movement into rotating movement
- Driving roll - Turns the rotating movement into linear movement
- Free roll - The other end where the ropes are attached
- Plow - Uses the linear movement to plow the sh*t so that the water can flow easily in the drainpipes
All the 3D models can be downloaded from here. In addition to the 3D printed parts I used the following parts:
- Various lengths of M3 screws, nuts and nylocs
- Some rope
- Ball bearings (size: 10mm x 15mm x 4mm)
- Aluminium pipe (diameter 10mm)
- Some rubber from bicycle inner tube
- And of course, a house with drainpipes
Note: this is a prototype and not guaranteed to work.
Usage
If everything goes as planned I don't need to clean our drainpipes ever again. Time will show what happens. Winter time and snow might be really bad for this. But that remains to be seen...
Action
There's a short video telling the story of the automatic drainpipe cleaner. Enjoy :)