The outdoor kitchen for BaanMae was finished today.

You can see the finished trellis that was only partially done last time I posted a kitchen update. Also, the sink and faucets are installed. (“Taps” for you Brits. 😉

Under the sink, we installed a UV and carbon water filter.

It is a standard 3 step filtration with a post-filter UV stage and then a post filter of some sort. We went with Mazuma brand because the Mazuma filters we have at our old home and at work have been working well for the past 7 or 8 years. (And their service is great. When we see the light blinking saying it is time to change the filter, we just call them and they send a guy to our house to handle it.)

As a side note about mounting the filter… because of the UV bulb, it needs 220V AC. We hadn’t planned on wiring an outlet below the sink, so we extended one of the outlets above the sink down. But the bigger concern is that the power supply for the UV light isn’t protected from water, and it is being installed under a sink. Sinks and faucets leak sometimes. And the cable is only about 30cm (1 foot) long, so it isn’t even like we can get it very far away.

So as usual, I began thinking of ways to build something to protect it in case some water begins to leak on it. The simplest option I came up with was to print a little “hut” for it.

After installation, it looks pretty nice.

Any slight dripping from above ought to be redirected away from the power supply, but it is still easy to access and remove the power supply for maintenance.

I really like 3D printing.

The last thing we’ll need to do is a little device we designed and built at work for a similar model. Since the UV light requires you to turn it on and off whenever you use it, it is really annoying. Remembering to turn it on is easy enough. (“I need drinking water… turn on UV light and then open tap.”) But it is very easy to forget to turn it off, which can cause the UV light to burn out. (The Mazuma guy told us that the light is designed to have the water flowing over it while it is on, so besides leaving it on longer, it won’t have the water flowing to cool it down once you turn off the tap.)

This seemed like a silly design to me, but all of the similar models from Mazuma and other brands are exactly the same. So we built a little push button microcontroller circuit to turn on the UV light at a button press, and off if you press it again. But if you forget to turn it off… it turns itself off automatically after a few minutes.

I’ll post some pictures once we build it for here.