Lifestyle & Innovation

A Retired Plumber Builds Ingenious Home Devices From Scrap. His Neighbours Cannot Stop Talking About It.

How one man turned his basement workshop into a laboratory for practical, low-cost inventions

Published: February 2026 | Reading time: 10 minutes

There is a basement in Hamilton, Ontario, that looks like it belongs in a science museum — if that museum were assembled entirely from items other people threw away.

The walls are pegboard hung with hand tools organized by function. Three workbenches line the perimeter, each dedicated to a different discipline: plumbing and metalwork on one, electronics and wiring on the second, woodworking on the third. Bins of salvaged components — motors, valves, sensors, copper fittings — fill an entire shelving unit. And in the middle of it all, wearing safety glasses and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, stands Victor Szabo, a 63-year-old retired master plumber who has spent the past eight years building practical inventions out of materials most homeowners would leave at the curb.

Victor has completed over 30 functioning devices. He has never patented any of them. He has never sold one. But at least a dozen of his neighbours have asked him to build copies of his creations for their homes — and three of those neighbours now tinker in their own basements, inspired by what they saw in his.

The Invention That Changed His Retirement

Victor retired from a plumbing career in 2018 after 38 years in the trade. For the first few months, he says he felt rudderless. "I was a man who had solved problems every day for nearly four decades," he recalls. "Suddenly there were no problems to solve. I was driving my wife Patricia up the wall."

The turning point came when their basement sump pump failed during a heavy spring rain. Instead of calling someone to replace it, Victor decided to build a better system himself. Over two weekends, he designed a dual-pump sump system with an automatic failover mechanism using a float switch from a toilet tank, a backup pump he found at a yard sale for $15, and a simple relay circuit.

The system has not failed once in seven years. When one pump activates, the relay monitors it. If the water level continues to rise after a set interval — indicating the primary pump cannot keep up — the backup kicks in automatically. He later added a battery backup that keeps the system running for up to eight hours during power outages, built from a marine deep-cycle battery and a small inverter.

"That was the moment I realized I could build things for the rest of my life and never be bored again," Victor says.

How He Gets His Materials

Victor's approach to sourcing materials borders on philosophy. He spends approximately two mornings a week driving through Hamilton neighbourhoods on large-item pickup days, scanning the curb for discarded appliances and fixtures. He also visits Habitat for Humanity ReStores, estate sales, and occasionally accepts donations from neighbours who know about his hobby.

"A broken dishwasher has a perfectly good water pump, a solenoid valve, a timer motor, and twenty feet of usable wiring," he explains. "A discarded hot water tank still has a functional thermostat, an anode rod you can repurpose, and sheet metal you can cut. People see garbage. I see a parts catalogue."

His average material cost per project is between $30 and $150, with most of the expense going toward new fasteners, sealant, or the occasional electronic component he orders online. The salvaged materials do the heavy lifting.

Five of His Best Creations

1. The Greywater Garden Irrigation System

Victor's most well-known invention among his neighbours is a greywater recycling system that diverts rinse water from the washing machine through a simple three-stage filter — a coarse mesh screen, a layer of gravel, and a charcoal cartridge made from a modified water filter housing — into a 400-litre storage tank in the garage. A small pump on a timer then distributes the filtered water to the garden through buried drip lines.

The system reduces the household's municipal water usage for garden irrigation to nearly zero from May through September. Victor estimates it saves approximately 15,000 to 20,000 litres of tap water per season. The materials cost him around $120, with the most expensive component being the storage tank, which he bought second-hand for $40.

Three neighbours have since asked Victor to build similar systems for their yards. He helped them assemble the components and taught them how to maintain the filters. "I do not charge," he says. "I just ask them to save me any broken appliances they come across."

2. The Passive Basement Cooling System

Hamilton summers can be humid, and running air conditioning in a basement is expensive. Victor's solution uses a principle as old as architecture itself: earth tubes. He buried a 15-metre length of four-inch PVC pipe about 1.5 metres underground in his backyard, running from an intake vent near the fence to the basement wall. A low-wattage inline fan draws outdoor air through the buried pipe, where the constant temperature of the earth — roughly 10 to 13 degrees Celsius year-round — cools it before it enters the basement.

The system does not replace air conditioning in the living spaces upstairs, but it keeps his basement workshop comfortable throughout the summer while consuming less electricity than a single light bulb. Victor measured a consistent 5 to 8 degree Celsius drop in basement air temperature compared to outdoor ambient temperature on the hottest days.

"This is not my invention," he is quick to clarify. "Earth tubes have been used for centuries. I just built one for the price of some PVC pipe and a fan. Total cost was about $90."

3. The Tankless Water Heater Pre-Warmer

Drawing on his plumbing expertise, Victor built a heat exchange pre-warming system that captures waste heat from the drain water of showers and the dishwasher. The concept is called drain-water heat recovery, and commercial versions exist, but they typically cost $500 to $1,000 installed.

Victor's version uses a coil of copper tubing wrapped tightly around a section of the main drain pipe in his basement. Cold incoming water runs through the copper coil on its way to the water heater, picking up heat from the warm drain water flowing through the pipe inside. The result is that the incoming water arrives at the water heater several degrees warmer than it would otherwise, reducing the energy needed to bring it to the target temperature.

He built the system for approximately $80 in copper tubing and fittings. He estimates it reduces his water heating costs by roughly 10 to 15 percent, though he acknowledges the measurement is imprecise. "I am a plumber, not a scientist," he says. "But the gas bill went down, and nothing else changed."

4. The Automated Sump Pit Monitor

After building the dual-pump sump system, Victor wanted a way to know what was happening in the sump pit without physically checking it. He taught himself basic Arduino programming — "at age 61, from YouTube videos, which my grandchildren found hilarious" — and built a monitoring system using an ultrasonic distance sensor mounted above the sump pit, an Arduino microcontroller, and a small LCD screen mounted at the top of the basement stairs.

The screen displays the current water level in the pit in real time. If the water rises above a set threshold, a buzzer sounds and a small LED light turns red. He later added a Wi-Fi module so the system sends a text notification to his phone if the water level reaches a critical point while he is away from home.

The electronics cost approximately $45. "If I had told someone thirty years ago that I would be programming computers in my basement, they would have checked me into the hospital," he says. "But the Arduino community is incredibly helpful. If you can follow instructions and use a soldering iron, you can build almost anything."

5. The Workshop Air Filtration Cabinet

Victor's newest project, completed in late 2025, is a workshop air filtration unit built inside an old kitchen cabinet. The cabinet houses two standard furnace filters arranged in series — a coarse filter to catch large particles and a HEPA-rated filter for fine dust — with a salvaged bathroom exhaust fan providing airflow. A simple speed controller lets him adjust the fan from low to high depending on how much dust his current project is generating.

The unit hangs from the ceiling in the centre of the workshop and runs continuously while he works. "Dust is no joke," he says. "I spent 38 years breathing in construction debris. Now that I am retired, I want to keep my lungs in the best shape I can. This filters the air for about $2 a year in electricity and the cost of replacing the filters every few months."

The Shelf of Honourable Failures

Victor maintains what he calls the "Shelf of Honourable Failures" — a display of prototypes that did not work as intended. The collection includes a wind-powered phone charger that produced so little current it was functionally useless ("it would take a hurricane to charge a phone"), a homemade dehumidifier that worked but was louder than a lawnmower, and a solar-heated outdoor shower that delivered water at a pleasant temperature for approximately four minutes before reverting to ice-cold.

"Every failure teaches you something," Victor says. "The wind charger taught me about electrical load. The dehumidifier taught me about vibration isolation. The shower taught me about thermal mass. You cannot learn these things from a book. You have to build the wrong thing first."

What Patricia Thinks

Patricia, Victor's wife of 37 years, has a complicated relationship with the workshop. "He is down there by six in the morning and I have to physically go get him for meals," she says. "But I will tell you this: our water bill is lower than any of our neighbours'. The basement has never flooded since he built that pump system. And he is the happiest he has been in years."

She pauses. "Also, he fixed the dishwasher last month with a part he pulled from a broken washing machine. So I cannot really complain."

His Advice for People Thinking About Starting

Victor is not evangelical about his hobby — he does not post on social media or run a YouTube channel — but when asked, he offers straightforward guidance for anyone curious about building things at home.

Start by taking apart something broken. "Before you try to build anything, learn what is inside everyday objects. Take apart a broken toaster, a coffee machine, a fan. Understand how the components work together. That knowledge becomes your foundation."

Solve your own problems first. "My best inventions came from annoyances. The sump pump failed, so I built a better one. The garden was expensive to water, so I recycled greywater. If you start with a real problem in your own home, you will stay motivated because the solution actually matters to you."

Invest in safety before tools. "Safety glasses, hearing protection, a fire extinguisher in the workshop, proper ventilation, and a basic understanding of electrical safety. These are not optional. I have seen too many injuries in my career to take shortcuts. If you are working with electricity and you are not sure what you are doing, stop and learn before you touch anything."

Keep a notebook. Victor has filled 14 spiral-bound notebooks with sketches, measurements, parts lists, and post-project notes since he started. "Ideas disappear if you do not write them down. And when something fails, the notebook helps you figure out why."

Do not worry about being original. "Almost everything I build already exists in some commercial form. The point is not to invent something the world has never seen. The point is to build something with your own hands, understand how it works, and make your home a little better in the process. That is enough."