Hello from South Africa + My plan

Hi All!

I'm Nicolas, from Johannesburg, South Africa. I got interested in laminar water flow from a video seen on Maker Magazine. So pretty!

First off, thanks for all the valuable information. I'm seriously planning to build my own nozzle. I have a pool, and want to shoot a jet or 2 into my pool. My hesitation was not the construction of the nozzle, but sourcing a pump and all the filtration necessary for it. I had a forehead-slap moment when I realize that I have all of this as part of the pool.

We are fortunate to have some incredible Summers, and as a result many houses have their own pools. (A quick shot of a neighborhood can be seen at http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=-26.035721,27.978884&spn=0.007201,0.009645&t=h&z=17 How many pools can you count?) With summer coming, I thought this'll be a great motivation for me to build my very first nozzle and integrate it with my pool. Yes, there are going to be many questions: I'll have to figure out the flow rate and pressure i'll be getting out, and experiment with varying it, if necessary. I should have all jitter removed from the pump - my existing sand filter will act as a low-pass filter (Hopefully, without dropping the pressure too much). The output flow rate will dictate the size of the nozzle (more so if i want more than one nozzle).

Anyways, i'll create a thread in the main forum when I start making some progress.

Welcome to the forum! Glad you joined up! Thanks for introducing yourself. It's really fun to get to know the people on this forum. It's really a nice forum everyone is really friendly. So if you have a question ask it! It's really a fun hobby and there is a lot to learn. It can be difficult sourcing all of your own parts, but that is part of the challenge and it makes you feel great that you built something so beautiful!

Something I just learned is not to use a brass ring in a pool the chlorine will pit the ring and ruin your knife edge. Maybe stainless steel will work better.

Side note: What units do you use in South Africa, metric?

John wrote:Welcome to the forum! Glad you joined up! Thanks for introducing yourself. It's really fun to get to know the people on this forum. It's really a nice forum everyone is really friendly. So if you have a question ask it! It's really a fun hobby and there is a lot to learn. It can be difficult sourcing all of your own parts, but that is part of the challenge and it makes you feel great that you built something so beautiful!

Thank you. Yes, it seems like a lot of the work documented is kludging :-P

John wrote:
Something I just learned is not to use a brass ring in a pool the chlorine will pit the ring and ruin your knife edge. Maybe stainless steel will work better.

I'll have to experiment with a couple of materials. Would plastics work? I'm thinking ABS or PVC. Obviously it's a bit more difficult to get a perfect knife edge, over a metal. Thanks for the advice.

John wrote:
Side note: What units do you use in South Africa, metric?

Yes, we do, but like other commonwealth countries, some things are sold in Imperial units.