We built an endless wine fountain with our own hands, spending only 6,000 rubles. I'll tell you what it's made of

Hi! My name is Lesha Shtanko, I work as a system administrator, integrator and write automation in Google App Scripts in JS in AGIMA. But I have another role – I am an active participant in our wine club. The guys and I taste wines, study their specifics and history, understand tastes and aromas. In general, we are aestheticists. And recently, for a corporate competition, we assembled a real wine fountain with our own hands, which can work endlessly.

I’ll tell you how (and why) we built it, what it is, and how to make exactly the same one at home.

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Spoiler: it's a lot easier than it looks.

Background: Why Do We Need a Wine Fountain?

Every year my company and I go out of town to AGIMA Camp. It's a big summer corporate event where we chat with colleagues, sometimes discuss plans for the future and just have a good time. This time the main topic of the trip was the American festival Burning Man. As a rule, its participants build all sorts of crazy sculptures and structures in the desert. So we were offered something similar – an engineering thought competition.

What's the gist: the whole company is divided into teams, and each one builds some spectacular art object. Moreover, they had to be built in the bosom of nature – on the territory of the art estate “Veretyevo” in the Moscow region.

We decided to team up with the guys from the wine club. We came up with a large art object made of metal and wine bottles. But soon we realized that all this lacked engineering thought. And then I suggested making our own wine fountain. Everyone immediately agreed that the idea was clever, but they did not immediately believe in its feasibility.

It seemed that the fountain was:

Expensive.
Difficult.

Looking ahead, I will say that the total cost of our mechanism was around six thousand rubles, I will give the estimate below. And as for the complexity – yes, there were concerns, but now you will understand that they were in vain. In the end, we collected the materials from the whole world, but I built it in practically one day. I started doing it in the morning, and in the evening by the general presentation the fountain was already working.

How to Build Your Own Wine Fountain

The first thing I needed was a box. I put all the stuffing in it. The main part of the stuffing was the reservoir into which the wine would drain from the bowl.
I also needed a small pump that would lift the wine from this reservoir into the bottles. According to my idea, the wine would rise through special silicone tubes.

This is essentially the main mechanism of our fountain.

We also needed the bottles themselves, stands for them, and some kind of bowl. For the bowl, we used a salad bowl, which suited us in style and size.

We drilled a hole in the salad bowl to fit the drain diameter. We chose the most common drain that is used in most sinks. The drain tube led back to the wine tank.

Thus, the system was as simple and clear as possible: wine was poured into a tank, from there it was lifted into bottles using a pump, from the bottles it was poured into a salad bowl, and from there through a drain back into the tank.

What difficulties awaited us

1. Holes in bottles.

The most important task is to drill the bottles. Firstly, they are uneven. Secondly, it is simply a very responsible task. We designed the fountain in such a way that we had to drill at the bend, closer to the neck, and this is the most inconvenient place for drilling due to the uneven surface. But we wanted the tubes to be located as close as possible to the place where the bottles are attached.

We used a regular feather drill for glass and ceramics. We chose a drill diameter one millimeter smaller than the diameter of the silicone tube. While drilling, we poured cold water on the bottle so that it would not overheat. We drilled smoothly, at low speed, very carefully. As a result, the hole is smooth, without chips.

Thanks to the hole diameter, we didn't need any glue or sealant. We didn't want to use them so that the wine in the fountain would be fit for consumption. So we simply pushed a tube through the hole, and it immediately sealed it tightly. Then we simply placed the bottles with the tubes on the bottle stands.

After that, we asked our chief of household affairs, Almaz, to drill a hole in the salad bowl to fit the drain diameter, inserted the drain there and moved the stands with bottles closer. All this was placed on the surface of the box so that the fountain would be integral. The structure was almost ready.

2. Power supply for the pump.

There were two options for solving the power supply problem. The first was to connect the pump via an adapter that fits into a regular outlet. But we knew that in Veretyevo, on the river bank, there could be problems with the power supply. Therefore, we used the second option: make the power supply for the pump autonomous.

We chose a small and not very powerful pump – about 3 liters per minute. It works via USB from a portable battery. We carefully assembled and secured everything. We made sure that the pump worked. However, after switching it on, it needed some time to accelerate. And after switching it off – for the remains to flow down the tubes.

But overall, it worked. It delivered wine through tubes into bottles. And when the bottles were filled to a certain level, the wine poured out of them into a salad bowl and from there back into the reservoir.

What would we do differently now?

As I said, after the power was turned off, the wine could flow down the sides of the bottles onto the lid of the box and from there flow into the fountain. We thought that this problem could be solved in three ways.

Choose another box. Our lid was made of slats. When the pump was turned off, the remaining wine could drip onto it, and through the cracks it would flow into the mechanism.
Get a more powerful pump. Then the wine wouldn't flow down the sides of the bottles after the power is turned off.
Tilt the bottles more to prevent liquid from running down the neck.

Everything else was in order. The mechanism worked, the audience was surprised and happy with our decision. We chose red Georgian wine to demonstrate the mechanism. And since all the containers were sterile and intended for food, drinking it from the fountain was not prohibited.

Estimate and useful links

Materials for the fountain itself:

Salad bowl, aka fountain bowl ~ ₽ 1400.
Silicone tubes (2 m) ~ ₽ 330.
Submersible pump USB ~ ₽ 500.
USB breaker ~ ₽ 250.
Bottle stand (2 pcs.) ~ ₽ 1000.
Drain ~ ₽ 400.
Wine tank ~ ₽ 400.
Empty and well-washed wine bottles (2 pcs.) – left over after the tasting.
The box was found at the dacha of our project office manager Roma Kuzmin.

Total: ~ ₽ 4280.

Almost all the materials for construction were provided by the company, but some things had to be found additionally. The same story with the tools: almost everything was found through friends and colleagues, and some were already available.

Tools:

Feather drill ~ ₽ 250.
Metal shearsto cut the bottom of the bowl to the diameter of the drain ~ ₽ 660.
Ties ~ ₽ 440.
Wood crownto drill a hole for the drain pipe in the box lid ~ ₽ 200.

Total: ~ ₽ 1550.

In total, the entire project cost about 6 thousand rubles. In the end, the fountain worked well, we got a standing ovation, had a great time and entered the top three in our engineering thought competition. And the fountain itself now stands as a monument to our cool idea at the dacha of the same Roma Kuzmin 🙂