Author Topic: Giving Fido a Drink  (Read 1581 times)

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OperaHouse

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Giving Fido a Drink
« on: December 31, 2016, 01:29:34 PM »
I have to leave town next week for ten days. I have a friend that is going to come and
feed the dog. Now he is a dog person,but he still thinks my dog is nuts and will eat him.
I decided he needed to limit his exposure to Rosie and just in case he missed a day, the
dog would have water to drink. The white tube on the bowl is the overflow which goes to a
floor drain in the basement where the dog door is.  The black tube is the fill line going
to an old washer solenoid valve. I knew if I waited long enough I would find a use for this.
The other valve has to be capped or else it would leak. These valves have to have positive
pressure on the inlet to seal. When filling, this valve jolts like a rocket. I had to put
a small sponge inside the inlet port to slow down the flow.

I was visiting a friends shop two weeks ago when I saw some capitol equipment waiting to
go to scrap and grabbed two of these plug in dual event timers. Bet you thought I would do
this with a UNO.  It just so happens that I used to work for the company that made these
timers and they are micro processor based, set up from 1 second to 100 hours.  So it is
like I built this.  I operate the valve for five seconds every hour. Any overflow goes out
the white tube down the drain keeping the water fresh. A spare set of relay contacts resets
the timer and the process starts over.

Warpspeed

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Re: Giving Fido a Drink
« Reply #1 on: December 31, 2016, 05:37:40 PM »
I have done almost the exact same thing to keep a bird bath full of clean and regularly changed water.

If you use a reasonable length of small bore pipe between the solenoid valve and what is being filled, the water flow is not that high, so the timer does not need to be set to extremely short fill intervals.
I have mine to flow for one minute every two hours from dawn to dusk.

george65

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Re: Giving Fido a Drink
« Reply #2 on: December 31, 2016, 07:28:20 PM »

And here's me just putting the bowl in the shower with a slow drip.

Friend of mine has a  plastic crate of about 20L for his dogs water and has an electronic sprinkler timer on the tap above for 1 minute 3 times a day.
Cleans out the trough and keeps the water cool on hot days.

Warpspeed

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Re: Giving Fido a Drink
« Reply #3 on: December 31, 2016, 07:49:50 PM »
I think that is the secret George, small but frequent refills. A bit of overflow keeps it pretty clean.

When I first did this bird bath thing it was really amusing.
The birds would come, drink daintily, then get in and splash around a bit.  They would then perch on the edge, turn around and poop into the water.

For the first couple of weeks the thing was just full of bird crap.  But they learned very fast. These days there is almost never any crap in there when I scrub it out, probably about every two weeks.