WaterSmurf
Projects
I'ts not a joke. When I first bought miy nice second-hand house, I didn't realize that our community had no sewer installed underneat the streets. Septic tanks look like a thing of the past, for people like me that have lived most of their lives in a big city.
Nobody cared about it, until we decided to upgrade the house and build a second space, in front of the current one.
The septic tank came into existence when our architect asked for it. Everybody got furious in finding the septic tank, because obviously, there was one. Everyone that has used the closet can attest it. No backgivings, no smears. It's like a black hole, (as it's supposed to be). Everything that cames into, disappears.
So if there is one, it should be placed somewhere, nearby the house, under the ground. When everybody got convinced that there was no clear evidence of where the septik tank was located, my wife suggested a process of making inferences through logical thinking.
--"If there is a septic tank, should be reflected at the house plans", said her.
I love her for many reasons, but specially because is able of taking all of us out of the madness with a rational approach.
The plans showed nothing but a pair of dotted lines and a legend: "To the septic tank".
Once everybody convinced that the septic tank was lost, there was a nice brainstorming about ideas on how to find the septic tank. It was an obvious opportunity to the joke and the laughing. So the growing up bag of ideas pointed to every direction possible, depending on the mood and the background of the speaker. Some of them were:
| Idea | Explanation |
| Throwing explosives | Detecting the explosion with a surface sismograph |
| Flooding the tank | and see where it overflows |
| A loudspeaker pointing down | try to hear the sound outside |
| Sending an small video camera | Watching the trip at the TV set |
| Wait to winter | Pour hot water and do a thermap |
| Stop watering the garden | See where the green is still alive |
| Build a pool | Sure it will appear in the middle when digging |
Letting jokes apart, the most reasonable approach for an electronic hobbyst was to send a RF probe through the closet and try to track the signal from outside. A really small probe can be built with a few surplus components.
The probe should be somewhat guided, in the sense that if we would leave a probe alone, the trip would be too fast to track. So we decided to send the probe, tied to a thin fishing nylon line. By marking the line by meters, we will control the position where to look for the probe. Once found the probe position, we'll progress to the next one, and so on until finding the tank.
Once the tank found, the line could be used to recover the probe.
We were feeling like the NASA guys, and the first name that came for the probe was "Septikus". So it was named.
Last update: 01 Feb 2007
