Riser for 5Gal Water Dispenser Pump

Avoid hurting your back if you have to lift a 5 gallon water bottle on to the countertop - let the pump do the lifting!

This is a solution for a problem that most of the folks here won't even have contemplated! At a certain point in life, lifting that damn 5 gallon water bottle up on to the kitchen counter just becomes a chore you don't look forward to! Especially if you've recently had a back injury :-/

So this week I finally got around to a project I'd contemplated a few years back but which didn't seem urgent enough at the time... a water dispenser that doesn't need the water bottle to be lifted up to the kitchen countertop!

1) PVC pipe. Google for: 3/4 in schedule 40 pvc pipe nearby

Ideally you just want one short pre-cut piece such as this 24in piece from Home Depot which costs $3.32

It's quite likely the smallest length you can find locally will be 10 ft (which should cost you between $5 and $10), in which case see if the store will cut it for you into 5 (24in) or 6 (20in) pieces, depending on how tall you want the pump to stand. For my kitchen, I used 19 inches although in hindsight I might have been better advised to use 21 inches.

You can cut it yourself. Getting a perfect square cut is not essential for this project. I cut mine quite easily with a Dremel cut-off rotary saw blade.

2) An electric water pump. Generally these are rather cheaply made Chinese products and I suspect they'll all very similar inside with just different case stylings for different vendors. They cost between $5 and $15.

The one I have was bought in 2020 for $10 and has worked well for 5 years now, but unfortunately it is no longer available so you'll just have to read the Amazon reviews and pick something yourself. (Mine was: Electric Water Bottle Pump Auto Drinking Water Jug Water Dispenser for Universal 5 Gallon Bottle which cost $10 in 2020.)

3) Food-grade silicone tubing of an appropriate length that fits your water pump. I think it's usually 1/4in inside diameter (ID) and 3/8in outside diameter (OD) but I can't be 100% sure. I've also seen roughly similar tubing described as 6mm ID and 9 or 10mm OD. I tested this project with some PTFE tubing I had bought for another purpose so the default dimensions in the OpenSCAD file reflect that tubing. This will cost about $1 per foot. (I recently bought 10 ft for $7 at Amazon). My setup uses 40 inches.

If you want to get fancy you could consider one with a weight but I consider that particular example somewhat overpriced. But at least you can sterilize the weight and use it again with new tubing.

Here's what the solution looks like: it's a standard cheap electric pump, raised up on a stand to a convenient height. There are several ways this could be done, but I've been teaching myself how to model things for 3D printing recently so that seemed like an obvious choice.

The pump is fitted on top of a piece of PVC pipe and the pipe fits on the 5 Gal water bottle with a 3D-printed adapter. The PVC pipe is only used as a support - it doesn't dip into the water and the water doesn't flow inside the pipe itself - there's a clean food-grade silicone tube inside the pipe for the water to flow through.

The pipe fits securely on the adaptor, and the adaptor fits snugly on the water bottle. My pump originally sat directly on the pipe since it has a protrusion underneath that fortunately was almost the right width to fit in the pipe, but it was a little bit uneven, so I made a second adaptor that has the same width as the water bottle neck for it to sit on more stably.

The 3D prints are designed using the OpenSCAD language, which allows for parameterised designs, so if your components don't quite match mine, just measure the various diameters and enter them into the OpenSCAD file to generate a new set of objects. People with a Bambu printer will be able to do this online using the customiser at Makerworld.com as soon as I've uploaded the file. The finished device is quite stable - you'ld think with that long stem that it might wobble, but the tolerances are tight enough that it's good and solid. If you make one and it wobbles, measure your bottle neck and your pump neck and tweak the parameters in OpenSCAD until it fits better. For now, the files are online at http://www.gtoal.com/OpenSCAD/riser/

(Folks used to 3D printing may appreciate that the parts were designed to avoid the need for any removable support. You can see how I arranged that from looking at the cross-section images.)

You'll probably want to cut the 3.4'' pipe and the food-grade silicone tubing to a length that is appropriate for your own kitchen.

Print the adaptors (which I did in ABS), push the tubing through the lower adaptor far enough that it reaches the bottom of your water bottle, slide the tube through the pipe, possibly trim the length of tubing at the top as you add the top adaptor, insert the lower part into your water bottle, and attach the pump on top, and you're done!

For hygiene, you will want to replace this tubing at regular intervals. How regular is up to you. Around 2 months per tube is probably reasonable. (Somehow this reminds me of the old dad joke, "Of course I bathe regularly! Once a year whether I need to or not!")

I was really surprised that there's nothing like this commercially available. There are lots of risers for water bottles but they all are for raising the bottle higher, which is exactly what you don't want if your back is hurting. With this, you can roll the water bottle from the front door, tip it upright, and attach the pump for convenient use all without ever lifting the heavy bottle. Your back will thank you.