Waterbuoy

Would you consider buying a new Trader from Tarquin at Emsworth?

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nicho

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Did anyone see Dragon's Den the other night, when the inventor of Waterbuoy was on. Cracking presentation saw the Dragons fighting each other to invest.

Waterbuoy is a PROPER device to save items that have fallen overboard - a chemical reacts with the water and releases a balloon, which also has a flashing light in it. The balloon lifts up to 2KG from the seabed. Looks really good, retails at £12.99, and can be seen on www.waterbuoy.com

I'm going to get a couple, it has to be better than the cork balls currently available. I realise there have been other similar products, I bought one, but it failed spectacularly - these look really good.

Edited to say they intend to bring in other models to lift heavy objects, eg outboards too, and right now their website is not responding!!
 
Watched it last night it was a really good presentation, he deserves to do well. What a stroppy cow that whatever her name is though asking him not to say ' as previously explained '.
 
I was amazed that he did the trick with the 1kg weight and got away with it!!!
The weight was such a low density because it was in a large box that the downward force from its displacement was nowhere near the 1kg - a very decieving demo and nobody noticed!!!!
There is no way that a small partly inflated baloon like that can lift anything like a downward force of 1kg acting upon it!!!!! Try attaching such a small baloon to a proper ikg weight as used on a set of scales and the baloon would make no impression on lifting it at all. Put the same weight in a large sealed wooden box and hey presto the density is reduced, the uplifting force on the box is much greater so there is very little of the 1 kg acting downwards and you have it lifting a 1 kg force.
You could use it to lift a human who alos has an sg of blow 1. Or even a 1000 ton object with a low SG.
So the cadget is only suitable for pretty small items and at £13 a go is not cheap enough to sell in volume.
I personally would not have invested in ot.
 
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Edited to say they intend to bring in other models to lift heavy objects, eg outboards too, and right now their website is not responding!!


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The only way you give lift a 30kg ourboard is to have a balloon large enough to support nearly all of that 30 kg - it would be enourmous!!! Thye heavy weight thing was a total misrepresentation of the physics.
 
Are you are saying that the immersed mass was less than 1 kg ? That's a naughty demo, if it is.

The size of a balloon displacing about 1.4 kg would have a radius of about 7cm. That seemed to me to be consistent with the human hands around it.
 
I reckon that a 30 kg outboard would be easily supported by a balloon with 40cm diameter - hardly enormous ! Putting that in another view, you'd need a volume roughly the size of 5 gallon fuel can to support your outboard; that's a balloon which could be contained in a bean can.

I am happy to sell to you - at a modest premium ! - the two units which I have on order and confirmed for delivery as soon as the production line rolls. We can then play with one to see if floats any object of your choice with an underwater immersed mass of 1 kg. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif Fancy a small bet for the RNLI ?
 
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Are you are saying that the immersed mass was less than 1 kg ? That's a naughty demo, if it is.

The size of a balloon displacing about 1.4 kg would have a radius of about 7cm. That seemed to me to be consistent with the human hands around it.

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I would agree with that. Without doing the maths for the size of balloon, it still follows that 1 litre of air will lift 1kg of load, whatever shape it is.

However, there is a more fundamental problem. In deeper water, the balloon will be compressed and not have the same lifting effect. I doubt if it will work in more than a couple of metres of water! While I can't remember the actual figures, I think about 10m of water equates to 15PSI (atmosphere pressure), so depending on the actual pressure it inflates to, I think you'd be lucky if it could actually lift your keys from the bottom of the marina at high tide!
 
Surely it's more to do with volume? If something takes up more space than it's weight in water it will float and if something is smaller than it's weight in water it will sink. so if the volume of the balloon and the thing it's trying to lift is less in weight than the volume of the water it's displacing it will float?
 
Exactly! Just think about it, a kilogram of steel will behave slightly differently to a kilogram of wood?
His weight in the demo was quite "large".
 
Good enough presentation and fair play to him for getting the dosh, however, it is a fairly specialised item and will only sell to boaty, fishy peeps and listening to his pitch he is planning to sell a quarter of a million of them in year three (was it £2m T/O) allowing for trade discount, vat etc.

Personally I cant see that as viable, once you have bought one and unless it is used you are hardly likely to buy another one so once every boater and every fisherman or anyone who works/plays near water has one where are the sales coming from? new product maybe but still very high expectations in my view. I dont think I would be putting my money in it. Mind you what do I know /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
 
As Mike pointed out:

30' of water will halve the volume of the inflated balloon, thus halving it's effectiveness, and every 30' will halve that amount.

However, the balloon may inlate before it hits 15', so would be 75% effective, for example....
 
Weight as such has no meaning in water.
A human weighs a lot out of water but actually nothing in water.

The density of water s 1 gram per cc- so 1000 cc of water weighs one kilo.

If I place a 1 kg lead weight in water (assume density ten times that of water) it will only displace 10% of its weight and would exert a net 900 gram downward force - the balloon would not pull this up.

If the item was steel that is a 1 kilogram of steel then its SG is about 8 -so its volume will be 1/8 of 1000cc = 125cc. It would extert a downward pull on the baloon of 875 grams.

Now take a sealed wooden box containing air (as used on the TV) - all together it weighs one kilo but has an SG of 1.1 - so in water it loses 90% of its weight and you only have a pull of 100grams on the baloon.

In order to reduce the density of a 30 kg engine with an SG of say 6, you would have to increase the engine volume by more than 6 fold - the ballon would have to be at least 6 times bigger than the engine!!!!

The device is only capable of lifting very small weights ... period.
 
I am not sure about some of the maths here. But I know this. When using an alderney ring to recover my 40lb danforth anchor and 40 ft of 10mm chain from 200ft down. All I need to lift the anchor out and suspend the lot on the surface is an 18" buff.
 
XS_XF
Not only is the link you gave the same thing, its actually a bit better as the cylinder baloon is easy to lift out and the cost is less than £4 per unit!!!!

At that price you can have 3 and change for the same as one of the water buoy.
 
I've had them or something like them for over two years. We give em to customers and sell em in the shop. Mind you these can only lift 120g i.e. avset of boat keys, not the 1kg he lifted.

So nothing new apart from the power. Ours even have the school logo on em
 
Sun Coast
He did not lift 1kg.
He used a wooden box with air in it that , out of water weighted 1 kg.
In water the box had a very sligh negative buoyancy and it is this little bit of negative buoyancy that he lifted and that was nowhere near 1 kg.

In fact the cheap ones readily available can lift 120 grams so if I had a 1 kilo box with an SG of 1.12 weighing 1 kilo out of water, in water it would weight 120 grams and so your cheap key lifter would lift it and apopear to be lifting 1 kilo but only really lift 120 gram ..... that is what they did on the show and nobody twigged!!!! That is why the 1 kilo weight was a alrge object - to lower the SG.
 
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