Here is the actual workstation I use to bring you fresh weeklyish five gallon ideas. 
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Tag Archives: Technical
Vacuum Cleaner
Here’s a contractor’s quality vacuum cleaner that hooks up to a five gallon bucket. By using a handled bucket, you will have a relatively light, portable vacuum cleaner useful for on a construction site. I suppose it could also be helpful if you have dozens of gallons of material to vacuum up in a single day without a disposal option.
For more on how it works, see the item listing on Amazon.com.
Update: Mackey, one of our readers, has sent in a link to the “Dust Deputy,” which is a advanced vacuum that uses a “cyclonic dust seperator” to save your filter from constantly clogging. And of course, it uses five gallon buckets to capture the dust.
Water Filtration System
Five gallon buckets are already being used all over the third world in water filtration applications. A cheap, simple system that can be put together with local materials is the biosand filter. This type of filter has been shown to remove 90-99.9% of disease spreading contaminants and a large proportion of heavy metals from the water processed through the system.
Other third world water filtration systems such as chlorination and solar disinfection are more expensive and less effective.
You can build your own five gallon bucket bio sand filtration system with a few five gallon buckets and some PVC pipe. Detailed instructions on a five gallon bucket based bio sand filtration unit are found on this ten page bucket filter pdf. For more information about the bio sand filtration process, read the BioSand Filter Wikipedia page or this extremely detailed 130 page biofiltration manual put out by the Center of Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology.
If you don’t mind spending a little bit more on an easier to build and better filtration system, you can build your own Berkey-style filter out of five gallon buckets, which will save you over 100$ over buying the full Berkey unit. (see price for the full berkey unit vs price for just the filter set.) With the ceramic add-on to the Berkey filter, you can even filter flouride out of your tap water.
Here’s a video from a guy who used the Berkey replacement filters mentioned above to make a home made water filter that works just as well as the expensive version!
Update: For an easy example of a water filter built using five gallon buckets, please see our guide here.
Hydroelectric Generator
This is by far the most technically advanced innovation I’ve found for a five gallon bucket so far. Sam Redfield developed this design to provide a source of electricity that can be built cheap and hooked up to any source of flowing water – including irrigation systems, creeks and streams, or even sewage systems.
If you are very mechanically capable, you can download the full 35 page design manual and attempt to build your own five gallon hydroelectric power plant.
The following video shows some of the assembly, as well as the generator in action.