In between work and working on my truck I decided to try and build an aeroponics system. It's loosely based on the setup @trojangrower created Nine 1 GPH fog nozzles and a bunch of 1/2" PVC and. I originally was thinking of making a couple rings of sprayers but that didn't fit in my bucket so I twisted all the fittings and made a helix. Fits nice inside a bucket The heart of the system is a 10 amp DC power supply and a 6L/min high pressure pump. I found a screen for a drain and it looks like it'll be a perfect net cup. It's hard to see in the picture ( I'm not sure how to create a gif to upload a short video) but the spiral of sprayers creates a mini tornado of mist which I think will be good for growing in. I cut a sponge into a support ring and took a cutting of a tomato plant to test it out. It worked great for a couple minutes but then the pump started leaking. It's a simple double action diaphragm pump with a couple one way valves to control the flow. The seal isn't much of anything considering the pump is rated for 130psi so I dried everything off and filled the groove for the seal with blue RTV. I'll give it a day to set and try again tomorrow.
That will grow a nice plant very quickly too. Also you can down scale a bit and make a clone machine like that and clone about 10 or 12 little limbs in about 10 days and have a good root ball
Fantastic oh so not like my model, very original brother! side note: I did try to use a fogger to clone last couple months ago, but didn't work, maybe contamination I think.
I was thinking I could even just.make two separate lids, one with a bunch of small holes for clones and one with a large hole for a net cup. Your grow was the inspiration! I'm excited to see how you solve the drain problem, I'll be adding a drain to mine in the future. Hopefully the foggers work but if not that's why I started with a tomato cutting. I put the cutting in some coco fiber to try and hold in enough moisture until the pump is working again I ordered a DC solenoid and I have a DC timer on the way as well. I'm going to make a resivoir out of 4" PVC. The pump is kind of loud so it will be nice to make it run as little as possible. It has an internal pressure cutoff switch which should make it easy to maintain a set pressure in the resivoir.
Oh, you didn't see the latest developments? I didn't try the new piece out as I don't want to move the plant, but I do have it. Also used a bulkhead with threads inside, so the piece just threads in (3/4"). That's looking really good, but I will be critical and point out that the bottom of the bucket will amass roots, gets really thick down there, like 6" or so, maybe more. Nice gif I Love making gifs now.
That seems wise, don't want to hurt the plant this close to the end. The roots are trying to reach water but they don't like to be in air right so would it work to take two buckets and stack them? Cut 75% out of the bottom of the upper bucket which will have the foggers and put down a sheet of landscaping fabric. Then cut a hole in the lid of the lower bucket so that the upper bucket will fit in part way. Put a cinder block in the lower bucket to make it less likely to tip and to support the upper bucket. That way I could gravity drain from the lower bucket with an air gap between the growing chamber and drain. The roots eventually would go through the landscaping fabric but they shouldn't go far since the fabric will stop the bulk of the mist. What do you think?
The fabric is a joke It will get through it. I really think the vent cap will work, only thing is that there is a slight vacuum created when the draining happens (I think) so it may suck them up; just need to test it. I wasn't too far from what you described. I've used rocks and double layered landscape fabric, in fact, there is a double layer and rocks in my aero since the start. It worked the last time though, although I did stuff a (piece of a) copper scrubby into the drain hole that time; idk if that helped, but I'm pretty sure it degrades, although I didn't see anything negative in my last SLH grow. That grow just used a halo ring, but the drain system was the same; just rocks and landscape fabric. Maybe just needed more rocks. idk.
Hmm you don't think the airgap between the landscaping fabric and drain would be enough? I was thinking of using the fabric to stop the mist from getting into the second bucket which would have the drain, not really to stop the roots. I figured a 16" airgap created by putting a cinder block in the the lower bucket would be enough of a deterrent for the bulk of the roots. I too think the vent cap will work but I already have cinder blocks and landscaping fabric so it'd be cool if I could make that work. I'm having problems with the pump still. It really can put out alot of pressure and it's still able to leak a little even with RTV in it. I think dialing the pressure down will help stop it leaking but I have to have a pressure tank plumbed in to do that. When I turned the pressure down the way it's currently set up the pump pulses on and off. I'm going to take the pump apart again and put JB weld under the covers this time
I want to give my airgap drain idea a try Prototype #1 pressure resivoir and solenoid valve. I do not recommend using PVC for any sort of pressure. That being said, it does work it's just risky. I used to make potato cannons as a kid and I never had one explode Pump mounted on plywood on a sheet of foam really helped cut down the sound. Once I get the pump sorted out I'll add more foam to help with sound reduction. The pump is still a little annoying to listen to at this sound level I found my stash of good hose clamps. I run these on the aftermarket fuel injection system on my truck. They can hold significantly higher pressure than the type from the plumbing department. The pressure switch stopped working in the pump and I can't regulate the pressure anymore. It easily can push 115 psi which was enough to make the screw caps and the pump leak even with it epoxied together. I'm going to get another pump and see if I can make that one work otherwise I'm dropping down to lower pressure. The misters still work fine at 45 psi, just not as foggy as at 100
I'm going to give this pump a shot. The pump I have has 5 screws holding each cover on and this one has 7. If it works I'll buy a spare and T it into the waterline. The power supply I got can handle both pumps and by having both pumps plumbed on parallel I should always have water to the plants even if one fails.
I was curious if my pressure tank was even adiquent so I decided to run some numbers. Using the ideal gas law with the assumptions: Air behaves as an ideal gas at the temperature and pressure of the system. Steady state conditions - the air temperature will be held steady by the water supply and the pump will not create a pressure differential so rapidly as to cause a faze change n= constant - n is the number of moles of the gas. Moles are a mesureable molecular quantity. The number of moles will always be constant in a closed system operating at steady state. T = constant - temperature is constant in steady state R = constant - R is the gas constant. Since the gas inside the system can not exscape the system nor will it be exposed to any new gas once the system is started, the type of gas,a thereby the gas constant, will not change. A bit of simplification later and I'm left with H1 = P2/P1*H2 My set up has 6" between the tip of the resivoir and the highest point the water can go before it damages the pressure gauge and I don't need to go over 110PSI. I assume atmospheric pressure is 14 PSI (P1) which means the max pressure in the system is 124 PSI (P2) These numbers result in the total height requirement of the reaivoirs to be 53". Finally, I wanted to know how quick the pressure drop would be per inch so that I could correlate pressure drop with water use. From this equation I now know that pressure drop is approximately 10 PSI/inch. 1 inch of water in a 2" PVC pipe, assuming that the ID is 1.5", is: 3.14/4* 1.5^2 = 1.77 in^3. = .0077 gallons I'm running 9 1 gallon/hour nozzles which equates to .15 gallons/minute. A single resivoir is not nearly enough to keep the pump off for more than a few seconds. I'll right up the solution tomorrow
I forgot all about a snow machine I was working on a while back that I had built to run on household water pressure Spraypaint caps actually work really good to mist water and they can be pressed into an 1/8" hole in a pipe. I robbed a few sprayers from my other project and built another aeroponics set up. I tried angling them to create a spiral of mist like the high pressure system does but the droplets are to large. I'm running it off a pond fountain pump. The new highpressure pump came in and it's perfect. It's half as loud and doesn't leak at all. Right now the water pressure is set at 80 psi which seems to be plenty to mist. I'm still try to figure out the programming on the timer for the solenoid. I'll get back to the math
Success! I redid my math, I made a few mistakes in the calcs above, and came up with 11.2" diameter by 13.4" tall. This would makes 4.76 gallon resivoir and hold 80psi for a minute with the misters on. I could build something with PVC but at that size it's not any cheaper than an expansion tank. I got a 4.5 gallon expansion tank for $45. It tcan now run for about 3.5 minutes before the pump restarts Only issues I have now are the bulkhead drain is leaking and the pump is still to loud to be in the same room as. It sounds like a minute compressor but quieter. I'll try and figure out a better way to add sound deadening to the bucket. The bulkhead is an easy fix
I saw that you were using frozen bottles in the reservoir, was that enough/do you recommend? The waterline from the pump started leaking while I was at work and now the motor is cooked. The barbed plastic connections on the pump just don't bite in as well as the brass ones. Im pretty sure I can just swap the motor from the old pump but this set up has been far to glitchy. I'm I'm going to see what I can do to redesign it. In the mean time I got my low pressure version set up. I think I'm going to add more sprayers and a second bucket since the pump is kind of overkill for atone plant 1500GPH. I rinsed the soil off some cucumber starts and put them in some aquarium gravel
I filled 1 gallon (empty) bleach bottles with salt water, but needed to switch them out each morning. One in the freezer, one in the res. It becomes very tedious after a while though, and such discipline. I've been thinking about adding a peltier to a reservoir, already have the layout in my mind, but my neighbor is giving me his fridge, so I was just going to stick a container in there and pump it out, keep the fridge at ~15-18C. The return line, if you can have it go up before it goes down, and form an artificial S strap, could help restrain roots. I've also thought about why I didn't get the rat tail so bad on the SLH, but I did get one when I reviewed, it was just not much, looked more like rot because I stuck a copper scrubby in the drain. I don't like doing that because the scrubby will eventually dissolve into the solution increasing copper levels, no thanks. Also, I didn't let the tap root dominate in the earlier plant by just doing DWC during (most of) the vegetative stage; this could have prevented the tap from getting sucked up. I think just cut it earlier on could help.
Well it's working! Needs a filter on the pump big time. Even pollen is enough to clog the nozzles. This will be an even bigger issue with the high pressure version. I used the same 3/8" drainline on these buckets that I had on the high pressure version and they're not cutting it. They're plenty for the fog nozzles pushing .15 gpm but not the spray paint caps. The airgap I tried to create in the lower bucket is gone and filled with water. I'm going to need at least 1/2" line to make this version work. Just going to be growing veggies until I work out the flaws
Oh this is great man! The sprayers are tight though, but like you said, an inline filter should work. I like those netting pots too; I've never seen any like that before, really nice to have a wide rim for fit.