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This is how we made coffee before. It was, let's just say . . . not fun.

Every workspace needs a place for the occasional cup.

Being banished from the house out to my former shop building required a bit of adjustment. In my old office, now the "adult guest room" which is across the hall from the "children's guest room", I had easy access to all the amenities afforded me by my home. The executive restroom was right next to my office. Very convenient. The breakroom was fully furnished with all the foodstuffs and beverage options befitting a person of my stature.

Building S1 has none of that. It was either work out some system to get all those things handled or do without.

I spent a LOT of time contemplating how I wanted to approach this. I needed two things: fresh water and some way to dispose of waste water. I was too far from our septic tank to make any sort of interconnect there, so that was out. I certainly wasn't going to install a second tank. No.

Fresh water was almost as big a problem. I had years ago brought a 3/4-inch water line from our irrigation manifold out to 'the shop' as it was called then. A bit later when the wife's pool went in, I constructed a deck and privacy partitions and "Area 51" was born. So fresh water was available, I just had to go outside to get it.

I didn't really want to take up the decking and dig another trench and Tee off a water line for Bldg S1 (as it's now known). Too much work. I also couldn't bring myself to consider doing any sort of above-ground water line. We do get freezing days and even weeks here sometimes. I didn't want to set myself up for disaster.

So I came up with the idea of using these two water bottles we had in our garage. They were otherwise just sitting there doing nothing, waiting on a natural disaster to make their life have meaning.

How to pull that off exactly was something that took a lot of trial and error.

I bought the fittings (shown in the gallery below) and did a few dry fits. They seemed like they might work. I did a wet test to see if the water bottle was going to behave normally using these fittings. It did.

I thought if I just put the bottle up high and piped as short as possible, the air would get sucked up and the water would fall down.

So I put it all together and it did NOT work.

I put in a straight flexible tube, and it did work.

The next day I shortened all my tubing to its shortest possible run. It did not work.

I was not taking into account all the physical parameters of this equation, obviously. I knew the water wanted to fall, and so it did fall until the vacuum in the bottle grew strong enough to hold it up there. Under the right circumstances, air could go up the tube, but the circumstances had to be right. Otherwise everything just balanced out and there was no flow.

So I thought I would try putting a tube in my PVC conglomeration to act as a vent. I added one 1/4-inch tube, and it worked, sort of. It was a very tiny stream, just enough to call a stream.

Back to the drawing board. I didn't think I had enough room to drill a 3/8-inch hole for 3/8-inch tube. Then I realized I had enough 1/4-inch tube to create the equivalent cross section, and I could easily drill two more 1/4-inch holes.

That approach worked, but not without a moment of despair. When I first turned it on, nothing happened. I couldn't believe my eyes! What in the world is going on!

After a few minutes of contemplation, I decided to attempt a siphon. So I wrapped my lips around the faucet and pulled. Lots of air. Again. More air and water. Again. Mostly water, and now there was flow. I had arrived at my destination!

Flow Demo:

Drain Magic:

Don't Be Shocked!

That drain may seem disgusting or even illegal, but here's why it's neither. The only activities happening in that sink are making coffee or tea, and rinsing cups after use. Anything involving soap happens elsewhere. For that reason, the drain is cleaner than the water you send down your driveway when you wash your car. This is not "gray water" because there is no soap or biological materials in it. Unless you count random coffee grounds now and then.

I"m leaving out a lot of details about how I constructed all this, but you can pick out a lot of those details by viewing the Gallery below. A lot of the techniques I developed building The Bug were used here. No point in reinventing the wheel.

A Gallery of Goodness

The Coffee Bar in Bldg S1 is a Thing That Works and boy am I glad. I really love the simplicity of it, and I love the fact that it's made mostly of recycled materials. That would include the faucet, which I had saved from our garage sink when I replaced it with a better one.

This was another one of those tiring, frustrating, irritating, gratifying, wonderful projects that keeps me moving.

And every workday, it gives me a place to go grab a cup. Ain't nuthin better.