Hydrofarm
Contents
Description
If you've got tools, space, a little extra time you can construct your own vertical hydroponic system to grow food all year round in your window. The basic configuration includes the bottles that act as plant holders, a bottom reservoir to capture/hold water, and tubing to move water through the system. It also utilizes a small air pump that uses water displacement to elevate the water up to the top of the system, where it can then trickle down through each plant.
Goal
- Construction of vertical hydroponic windows farm for plants from plastic bottles.
More information
http://our.windowfarms.org/2009/07/29/3-plant-air-lift-window-farm/
step by step instructions:
http://our.windowfarms.org/instructions_dev/index.php?language=2§ion=1
To cut glass bottle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVyz3ZwEivw
Obstacle
A list of potential obstacles
- An obstacle
Components
- Glass bottle (recylcling should be better, pet is pretty bad for you)
- can be simply mate bottle, the geeky feel is a plus
- Water pump:
- the first solution is a hornbach water pump.
- Second solution would be a cooling system pump.
- Fred: I have two water pump from coffee machine (230V)
- Timer:
- We can even go further and use an mbed, or the serial port of [foo|Internal_Server].
- Top and bottom reservoir of water
- No top reservoir should do it, we can add one after to normalize the water flow
- Tubes:
- some copper tubes would add a nice touch to the whole thing
- pvc tubes could be a simpler solution, but that wouldn't be that reliable under the heavy sun.
list of components:
File:Parts list.pdf
Bottles cutting instructions:
File:Bottle cutting templates.pdf
Schedule
- 23 March: some pumping test with a coffee pump. Two main issue have occured : the pump is not powerfull enough it can only withstand a water column of 2 meters. The flow is also not important enough.
- 24 March : Second try with the coffee machine pump. The flow seems to be sufficient with a little tube. We can maybe use a double reservoir approach, one up and one down.
- 18 April : Basic pump testing with the coffee pump, it only need a nice box around it to secure the 220V connection. Apart from this, everything is working fine.
