Hello I need some help with figuring out a way to make the water flow in my grown room. I am designing a box, it will be around 24 across by 48" tall. I plan on using super soil ( believe its called supercools soil ) in a 5 gal bucket or something similar, and i am going to do a scrog setup. My plan is to have a separate 5 Gal bucket outside of the grow box, water will be pumped into the box from the bucket outside and top feed my plant. my question is how can I return the water that drains threw my plant back into the outside water supply without an additional pump? I was thinking of drilling a hole in the bottom of the inside bucket and making a pipe line that will return the water, but then I run into the problem of the dirt going into my outside bucket and possibly messing with my pump, plus i don't want to end up loosing all the soil my plant needs. My goal with my grow box is to have 0 maintenance. Everything will be on set timers and I will be able to control water, temp and just about everything from my phone. i should only need to open the door no more then twice a week to do scrog work. But the only problem I am having is i don't know what to do with the drained water, and I'm trying to be as cheap and effective as possible I have all my supplies that I need to make it work from my other set up, but i need to move it because it gets to hot in my garage compared to my house, and I'm away from the house a lot so it can't be high maintenance. I will attach a diagram of my design and constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated.
How about making it a SIP setup? It's posted in the organics section. Just search for sip... Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum mobile app
at first I thought an air lift pump would work but ur media is dirt, but if the drainage was collected into a mini reservoir it might work? air pump could be controlled off/on remote? just a thought
The Sip sounds like a decent idea. I will have to do a little research on watering schedules, the only problem i can imagine with it is over watering but that might be able to be solved if i connect a tube to the one gallon mark on the bucket so that any extra water will run down to a tub or something similar. i don't have a powerful light so my plant is going to be close to the top of the box and if i have any extra room i can make a shelf to put the bucket on and drill a hole so the run off tube will drain into a container below. Thank you both for your ideas any other comments are welcomed.
The whole idea of a SIP is that the plants gets the water it needs from a reservoir below the perlite or other media the smart pots sit on. There's no possibility of over-watering because the plants don't sit directly in water. Besides that, a good organic soil should be kept moist to allow the microbes in the soil to thrive and continue to feed your plants. Top dressing and ACT would be the only thing being top-watered into your plants.
Maybe this will make a little more sense. In the original SIP description, there was one plant to one reservoir. I changed the design a bit and put all my plants in one tray. This is an old pic, but it helps to see it. Instead of a bucket below the tray, you put in a pump and reservoir. Pump up to the tray to wet the media, overflow falls back into the reservoir. If the tray has a reserve and the reservoir is full, you can put the pump on a once a day timer to top off the tray and keep the media wet. You can even add nutrients this way, but that's not really the idea of organic growing, the nutrients are already in the soil. The original design in called ebb and flow, but combined with the SIP concept, it works well. Hope this helps you visualize a little better.