Tip Buckets or Dump Buckets are a popular water feature. A centerpiece of most parks it’s the tallest feature with a significant attention-getting water effect. The bucket will slowly fill water, and when the water reaches a certain level, a warning bell will sound a few seconds before the bucket dumps it content onto willing and unwilling people below.
The buckets you find at a water park are usually around 300 to 600 gallons. That is much more water than what we wanted to manage. We decided to go with a smaller bucket than most tip buckets and use a wine barrel. A wine barrel holds around 60 gallons of water.
Design and Concept drawings
The Controller,
The tipping bucket had an Arduino controller that controlled the time for the fill and delay stages of the bucket. The Arduino controlled a 110 v relay that switched a deep well water pump.
Where do you place the hole in the bucket?
One of the first questions I had was where do you place the hole in the bucket. We found the location of the axle was important to the performance of the bucket. Using Home Depot buckets and PVC. I created a smaller tip bucket models to test bucket rotation to hole location on a smaller scale.
What was the best placement for the hole in a five gallon bucket?
The answer was a little below the center of gravity of your container. Also, we found if you drilled to low you can add weight to the bottom to adjust the tipping point and move the weight to one side or the other to determine what direction the bucket would tip.
Hi there, i’m designing a similar tipping bucket for a mechanical engineering project at University. I was wondering if you have any calculations about the exact location for the pivot point. I’ve produced a working prototype and found the rough place for the pivot so that it tips all the water and the bucket returns but i need to back this up with a solid calculation. If you could be of any help it would be greatly appreciated.