As part of Toilet Twinning, tap twinning is an initiative from Tear Fund. The idea is to twin ones tap with one in another country and the money goes to provide and support teams working to improve hygiene, sanitation and water supply, especially to combat the COVID 19 Pandemic. One gets a card to display near the tap to show it is twinned and with where. Having two taps I twinned two!
The first was with a tap in Guatemala. I put in near the kitchen tap. It says it is a “tippy tap” but in fact it does not appear to be.
The second one is a “tippy tap” and is with one in Uganda. That went in the bathroom.
Inside the card it explains what a “tippy tap” is.
And how to make one.
It sounded fairly straight forward, so I thought I would have a go at making one and collected all the materials I would need – candle, pliers, nails, string…
But it turned out that sealing the bottle with candle and pliers was not easy! I couldn’t do it so that it stopped leaking when I tipped it, even though I tried about 6 or 7 times. I made the hole above where the (failed) seal was where the water was supposed to come out and that would have been OK if the seal had worked.
I also made the holes at the back to thread the string through to hang the bottle up – but then could not work out how to get the string through from one hole to another! Perhaps they should have been nearer the edge of the bottle?
So I have to conclude that either it is not as easy as it looks – or that I am fairly incompetent! Oh well, it was quite fun trying. I hope the people making their own tippy taps are more competent than me.
It was worth twinning the taps though – for what it does and for the interest of trying to make my own.