Over the weekend the weather in Denver was very cold! Wouldn't ya' know it, the heat in our house started acting up... that could fill a book! So, let me just tell you about one problem... a dripping air release valve.
Over the years the little valve occasionally spits and sputters a bit, which is it's only job in our hot water heat system. Last week it started dripping... oh bother! I put a little metal lid under it to catch the water where it could evaporate. I quickly found out that the drip was too fast for that and it overflowed the lid. I put a larger lid under the valve and it only required a paper towel spunge and a few trips to the nearby sink to dump the lid.
Saturday night the drip got so fast that it needed dumping every 2 hours... it was 3:00 AM and how was I going to sleep??? I decided to try a siphon wick to see if that would save me from hving to try to seal a hole around a tube to take the water from the lid into the floor overflow drain.
Siphon wicks are often used around machinery. Basically you have a cup with oil in it and a stand tube from the bottom of the cup up the center. a wick is dipped into the oil, is fed down the tube onto a bearing and the top is allowed to fold over the lip of the tube and dangle into the cup of oil. So, one end of the wick is in the cup of oil and the wick goes up over the tube edge then down the center of the tube and out the bottom of the tube above the bearing. This configuration causes a slow steady drip of oil from the wick and can empty the cup! Amazing! It works by cappilary action. If you think that is not strong enough, think about the fact that the same force pulls water up 200' to the top of a tree! http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/mccoy/wick.html
For my applidation, I changed the configuration some. Like I said, I did not want to punch a hole in the lid and try to seal it - if I wanted to do that, I could just install a tube drain. So, I took some flexible clear plastic tubing with 1/4" id. I tore a 12" x 3" strip of paper towel and rolled it up into a semi-stiff rope. I pushed the dry towel rope into the tube while twisting it until only a tiny end stuck out. I used some scrap copper wire to tie the tube end into a "J" and hooked that ofer the edge of the lid so that the wick got wet. The tube went over the edge of the boiler case and down to the floor drain.
To my great amazement, the wick immediately pulled the water up, over the bend and started soaking the wick the rest of the way down the tube. The next issue was whether the water would drip off the end of the wick and on down the tube to the drain. It took a while and I was a little nervous because the water was rising in the lid! Soon I saw drips going down the tube! Woo Hoo! Was it fast enough?
It was. Actually, I got another surprise. Every now-and-then the water would start to make little "plugs" in the tube rather than running down the tube. That scared me at first until I saw that the plugs were slowly moving down the tube with new plugs forming above. As soon as there were enough plugs, they would weigh enough to actually start a regular siphon that drained the entire lid very quickly. Then, the system would go back into it's slow drip mode. This tided me over until I could get my heater guy over to take a look on Monday. He was very impressed by my siphon wick gadget and very glad that he was not called at 3:00 AM!
While snooping around for other examples of siphon wick applications for this post, I found the quintessential case... enjoy reading about a siphon wick used to dispense "bear repellant"...
http://www.ultimatesportsmen.com/stories2/curley.html (0ops... link is to a general blog and I can not find that specific post... anyway... the guy said that when he camps he "marks his spot" by pissing on trees around the perimeter! Now, when he wants to be sure it stays fresh, he pees into a bottle and hangs a little bit of wet rope into the bottle and down the side. That starts a siphon wick that produces a slow drip!)
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