Children’s Day deserves a proper gift. And what could be better than the combination of sand and water? The first post on honzas.cz therefore could hardly be anything else than inspiration for bringing water to a children’s playground with a sandbox, creating a shower, a fountain, and a slide accessory in one.
The playground that received this little water system is from Jungle Gym. In our case it is the Chalet playhouse, extended with a Swing module and a climbing wall. The idea was simple: take a container, open it up, hang it on the playground deck, connect it to a hose distribution system, add a few garden quick couplers and valves, and a gravity-fed shower is born. Water is poured into the container with a watering can, and then it is up to the children’s imagination where those few litres will end up.
The idea came from an old discarded expansion vessel from a gas boiler. It was bright red on the outside and had a 3/4” thread at the bottom, which made it almost ideal for a proper DIY modification. First came the angle grinder and the top of the vessel went away. Inside, apart from plenty of rust, there was a rubber bladder clamped between the two sides. A snap-off knife did its job and the rubber followed the top. A file and a sanding mesh, originally meant for drywall, took care of the rust and sharp edges.
I attached the vessel to the front beams of the playhouse with two hex-head screws, steel washers, and rubber seals. A garden-hose splitter with two small valves went onto the thread at the bottom, so water can be drained from the vessel without unnecessary walking to the end of the distribution line.
I bought the splitter in Bauhaus in Plzen, where I gradually moved from the Gardena shelf to the cheapest no-name hose connectors. I would avoid them for pressurised water. For a children’s gravity-fed system they are ideal, and wonderfully cheap. Besides the hose couplers I bought six metres of transparent hose with a 12 mm inner diameter, a plastic garden spray gun, a stop connector, a plastic T-piece for 12 mm hose, and plastic cable clips.
The hose runs from the container around the slide and through a hole in the perimeter board directly under the deck. This is where the cable clips come in. They were originally meant for cables with a diameter of 6 to 16 mm, but they hold the hose just as well. Under the deck the hose splits through a T-piece, so the water can be used in two places.
One outlet with a stop connector is at the height of the first floor of the playhouse, where a garden-hose shower will be useful in summer. The remaining hose can also be connected there and will reach down to the ground, where the plastic spray gun can be attached. The second outlet is in the opposite corner and ends in a garden tap, again connected with a quick coupler. The spray gun can be attached there as well, which is enough to start a battle for the castle that begins in sand and ends in mud.
In the end, all that remains is to take a watering can, fill the vessel, check that water flows where it should and does not flow where it should not, and invite the first small tester. One final note: the splitter is at the container intentionally. It makes draining quick, and when I get tired of carrying watering cans up to the first floor of the playhouse, I can connect a garden hose there and fill the system through “remote access”.