Eco Trick #9 Building Simple Door with Pipes

By urban farmer -

Background

Note: 
For this eco series, 90 to 95% of all the materials used are all recycled/up-cycled materials except when safety is concerned. Materials needed for building structure like beams, roof cover are acquired, all others are recycled/upcycled.
No part of writeup from this site can be reused in any way without written permission from the blog writer.



#IdeasOnWhatCanBeUsed #MatchingNeedsToWasteCollected
Any built up enclosed sheltered area will need a door. Green house door will need to be netted too to prevent tiny pests from entering the plot. 

We need to build a custom door with fine netting, relatively strong frame yet easy to mount to the green house round side pillar. Most importantly with minimum cost as agriculture margin is extremely low. Last but not least we use recycled materials too, to stay true to our eco focus.

The team looked through all the existing material gifted to us till date, then set our brain cracking.

Seeing The Light Bulb

#DiscardedPipes #RecycledBottles #StrongString #LeftOverNetting


The end result is a door like above. A two panels door ( a very small panel and a huge one). The small panel can be opened when we have big item going through the door. Normal operation will only need to open the big panel. We built them with pipes, netting as well as recycled bottles.

Where did we get so many recycled pipes? Community Gardens typically acquired water pipes, cut to standard length to construct some kind of shelter/cover/supports to protect their edibles either from pests or heavy rain.


We were gifted a good 50 to 80 pieces of 1m 25mm grey pipes, many L and T joints. We have lots of left over green house netting too. We therefore went ahead to design a door with all these recycled materials.

After building the frame with all the pipes and joints, we wrapped netting around the frame and secured the netting onto the frame with fish wire. You can use agriculture clips to secure the netting too.



To ensure that the door can move freely, we use a pipe in pipe design. The outer pipe is secured to the pillar with U clip (fix). The inner smaller pipe formed part of the door frame and is the moveable piece.


Hand Free Auto Close Action

#PowerOfRecycledBottles #JustASimpleHouseHoldHook

It is easy to push a door to open using our leg/body when our hands are preoccupied. But to close it after immediately ( prevent pests from entering) is a bit troublesome. We therefore decided to use a recycled bottle as counter weight to automatically close the door.


The video above shows how the weight kicks in and pull the door to close. Recycled bottle filled with water and some good string are all we needed to do the job.


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