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Society for Amateur Scientists

by Sheldon Greaves

When you need some suction, but not the power of a vacuum pump, you probably need an aspirator. An aspirator is a simple pump used to reduce the air pressure in a vessel. It uses the force of water flowing out of an ordinary faucet to create a weak suction. For instance, you can use it to pull liquid through a filter. Many of the projects on the Amateur Scientist CD assume that you have access to an aspirator. However, finding aspirators can be a problem.

Recently, I designed on paper what looked like a workable home-made aspirator and, while trying to run down the parts for it, found a simple, one-stop solution to the problem. All you have to do is go to a hardware store and ask for a waterbed draining kit. Sometimes these are also called "fill and drain" kits. The kit consists of a plastic aspirator that attaches to your faucet, along with some extra adapter parts for different sized spigots, a piece to attach to the waterbed drain outlet, and a bottle of anti-bacterial waterbed conditioner solution. The aspirator is used to pump water out of the waterbed when it needs to be drained.

Shawn and I went down the street to a local hardware store and found a waterbed fill and drain kit for just $3.99!

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