It’s not a great way to end a trip to be greeted by desiccated or drowned houseplants. Travel and houseplants don’t get along terribly well.
My partner, Dwight, enjoys long winter trips and growing things. I enjoy long winter trips and playing with tech. When it comes to indoor gardening, it’s a match made in Heaven.
In the past few weeks we’ve been setting up the infrastructure to sustain an indoor garden in a tiled area of our home. The garden consists of floor plants, two 6-foot-high industrial wire racks, and a three-level rack with grow-lights. Most of the plants will be decorative, but the grow-lights will nurture micro-greens, baby greens, and herbs. All the racks are on wheels.
We’re at the prototyping stage, but we’re getting close to a viable system that will sustain plants wherever we are in the world. I’ve been learning and building one part at a time. Each day, two or three packages have been arriving from Amazon, Rain Bird, or specialized vendors.
Each plant has a dripper that delivers water based on the size of the plant. Big plants get more water than small plants. One of the challenges has been maintaining water pressure at different heights. Initially, plants on the floor were getting too much water, and plants 6 feet above the floor were getting little or no water. This challenge has been resolved by upgrading a water pump, and building a balancing system that allows us to adjust water pressures.
For now, I’m not automating the watering based on soil moisture. Instead, each watering is manually initiated using a control panel on our phones and tablets.
I’m logging the watering patterns and will automate irrigation once we have a handle on things.
To assist with watering, small wireless soil sensors report current conditions for three of our houseplants.
We can also check on the health of the plants and the irrigation system remotely using an inexpensive Webcam (currently $30) that pans, tilts, and zooms. The following Webcam screen capture shows a critical part of the irrigation system: pressure balancing and distribution to individual plants.
The bucket is temporarily collecting water from the drippers for the lowest level of plants. This saves the plants from drowning as we tune the system at each level of the rack.
A quick-disconnect hose coupling, purchased from a vendor of beer brewing supplies, makes it easy to temporarily wheel the rack anywhere in our home.
Minimizing the possibility of flooding has been a major consideration. The reinforced supply hose is continuous all the way back to a submerged pump in a 30-gallon (114-liter) tank. The balancing and distribution system has the most tube connections, so it’s sitting in a commercial-sized growing tray that can hold over 17 gallons (67 liters). When watering, we’ll watch this part of the system using the Webcam. If we spot a leak we can stop the pump. If the Internet goes down, the pump shuts off after a preset number of minutes. There’s also a wireless sensor that shuts off the pump if it detects a leak.
Once we’ve got a reliable, proven system with plants installed, I’ll post more details, including a list of parts.
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