design ideas - Flooding #2

Alas, the rain continues.... and combined with the wind direction, rain is being blown onto the back door of the house.  This has meant that every time I open the door to go out to my shed to make a model or two, water runs off the door and drips off it's end scribing a perfect arc onto the floor inside.  It's becoming annoying.  I can't believe that door manufacturers haven't come up with a nice cosmetic way to gutter the water off the door to prevent this, which would be an additional USP and could easily be provided as an additional option. 

5 minutes with photoshop provided me with a design solution, a gutter that runs along and extends beyond the edge of the door when open.  I'll admit my modification is not that beautiful (if I spent more time on it I could make it amazing), but even like this, it's better than having to continually lay and change newspaper every time it rains.

design idea - Flooding

This week, the rain in blighty has reached near biblical proportions.  It's autumn and many roads have become flooded as fallen leaves have blocked drains causing several problems.  As a driver, you don't know where the edge of the road is and you also don't know where the drain is if you want to try an unblock it. I was wondering if I could come up with a design solution to solve these issues, so generated two ideas that are cheap to manufacture from plastic and polystyrene and are retrofittable to a current drain.

1. is a float that sits in the drain and as it starts to fill raises to indicate where the drain is. 

2. is an idea to stop the drain blocking by having a floating cage lift up to prevent leaves from clogging the top of the drain.   Both have issues, but are ideas in progress.