I have a pooling flat roof that I can’t afford to have repaired just yet. So last December to prepare for winter and all the rain we get I installed a 4mm siphon tube to let me drain off the water and reduce the weight.
Due to the proximity of the garden fence and the nature of the roof I can’t get a ladder up there so I used my drone - a DJI Mavic Pro Platinum - to install it.
I attached the end of the tube to a 250g weight disc to hold the end of the tube in place and made a hook under the drone from a cut down Boomco dart (Google it!) and some cut down bamboo skewer held in place with a Velcro wrap. I tried using the rock in the pic as a weight at first but it was over 800g! Amazingly it managed to lift it but as I got higher and it lifted more and more tubing the combined weight got too much and it wouldn’t quite clear the roof. So I ‘borrowed’ a 250g disc from a set of dumbbells. That worked perfectly.
I lifted off into a hover before hooking the weight to the drone - Then up and over the roof and use the camera to get in as close as possible to the centre of the puddle. Then I lowered it slightly to give some slack in the string and backed away to unhook it. Amazingly it worked perfectly!!!
A couple of videos - the drone one is the live feed hence not exactly 4K but you can see what’s going on. Anyone else used their drone for anything weird?