I hunted the threads and available resources and have concluded that I need some more thoughts.
I am a new TD for a high school that participates in a statewide high school drama festival. Of course, the script calls for a character to
"hose down the tiled floor. Water flows into the drain."
The show starts and ends with this
image.
Hose, running water, drain, easy enough, right? The trick is that this whole contraption needs to travel, fit through a single door, and be set up in 5 minutes and taken down in 5 minutes. I can help with the building but not with the installation.
Before ruling out running water and finding the obvious alternative with a sound
effect and some lights/projection I wanted to pose the question:
How the hell do I get running water on
stage within these parameters?
@TaylorRose Here's another thought for you, one you may like better: Silent, no pumps or batteries, readily
portable.
Look into "bladder tanks". Bladder tanks are similar to "hydraulic accumulators" only for water rather than hydraulic oil.
Bladder tanks are commonly used on cottage and farming water systems, systems where
electric or gas powered pumps are used to pump water from a nearby lake up hill to the cottage or farm. Rather than having to run the pump each and every time you want a glass of water, you run the pump to fill your bladder tank and compress the air trapped behind the bladder. Once the pump has reached a desired maximum pressure, a
switch senses the pressure and shuts the pump off. You can use water at whatever amount and rate you need until the pressure in the bladder tank becomes too low to be useful then you need to run the pump again to refill the tank and re-compress its bladder.
An area
amateur group did a production about cooking with a kitchen sink in a
portable counter
unit which required running water.
I purchased a small ( Approximately 3 gallon) bladder tank and added a ball valve as a shutoff for transit.
After every performance, I took the tank home and refilled it from our garden hose, our home was closer to Lake Ontario and our garden hose delivered decent pressure filling the tank sufficiently for two performances (matinee and evening). The
venue was miles from Lake Ontario where city water pressure was lower and wouldn't push as much water into the tank as our garden hose.
Prior to each performance, I'd position the bladder tank in its cupboard below the sink, connect it to the sink's cold water tap and open the ball valve ready for another performance. Pushing water up hill, even from the bottom of the cupboard to the sink's tap, requires an amount of pressure. Our carpenter built a little shelf in the cupboard under the sink to raise our bladder tank as high as possible, until it was immediately below the bottom of the sink.
Worked well, a year or two later another area
amateur group borrowed the bladder tank when they produced the same production.
Quiet, small enough to be
portable (as long as you don't need 45 gallons of water) conveniently refillable, a great little solution and not too expensive to implement.
Home Depot, or similar, MAY
stock bladder tanks; companies dealing with water systems for cottages and farms would definitely know of and
stock them. Travel trailer suppliers MAY be another source.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.