The Dustpan Hack That Makes It So Easy To Fill Up Large Buckets From The Sink

There are various reasons why you may need to fill up a large bucket with water. Perhaps you need to wash a sizable section of your floor or want to keep your little ones busy with a DIY water table. Whatever you might need it for, it's not always easy to fill a bucket up in the sink due to the fact that it might not fit in the basin or under the faucet. That's when you need to grab a dustpan, and not so that you can wet the dustpan before you sweep up your floors, but to hack it into a DIY funnel.

For this hack, all you need is an ordinary plastic dustpan. But it should be deep enough to be able to hold a little water and also have a handle that's either a hollow tube or at least curved on the lower side. If it has a hole in the handle — for instance, to hang it up — then you'll need to plug or cover this somehow. Perhaps simply add a piece of tape on top or fill it up by using a hot glue gun. When you've done that, then you're ready to fill your bucket with your new dustpan funnel.

For this dustpan-turned-funnel hack, if you need clean water, opt for a new dustpan. Since you'll likely use this hack on more than one occasion, you can designate a dustpan for this specific purpose. As for the hack itself, there's not much to it beyond positioning the dustpan so that the water will funnel down the handle and into the bucket below. For your bucket, you could place it on the floor, or you could put it on a small table or chair so the water doesn't have as far to go (as well as mitigate any potential splashing).

Basically, you're using the dustpan to direct water wherever you want it to go in the same way you might use a pool noodle as a DIY funnel to fill a water bucket. This allows you to still fill up the bucket by using the sink, but you don't have to worry about squishing the bucket under the sink's faucet (if that's even possible) or going out to get a garden hose aerator adapter to fit the spout (along with a garden hose if you don't already have one). What's more, you don't have to lift a heavy bucket filled with water out of the sink's basin or hold it up as it fills with water and becomes heavier by the second. With a dustpan funnel, you just need to hold the dustpan and turn the water on.