by britta
Jackson’s Airlift System- Reblog from Superforest
1:31 pm in Seeking Advice by britta
This is from Jackson’s blog at Superforest.
I found my way into the vertical garden/hydroponics section of youtube, and there I feasted like a wild wildebeast.
I gorged on gallons per minute tables, pvc piping comparisons, and silicone sealant. I learned about pump volume ratios and outflow units and bleeder valves and plastic tubing.
And in the end I thought: I could design a system for growing food and flowers just like these but much, much simpler.
And so I went to the drawing board and tried out some ideas…
And here we are now.
My idea, which I happily share with you all, is to use a six-gallon bucket, a few lengths of pvc, an air pump, a short section of tubing, some zip ties, and one-gallon milk containers to create a personal, scalable, hydroponic (soil-free) drip-irrigation food machine.
I call it: The Jackpot.
An air lift is a wonderful and simple device. It’s just a length of pipe, open at both ends. You feed an air line into the bottom of the pipe and submerge it under water. The air bubbles within the pipe form an upward current and water is carried up to the top of the pipe. Simple, cheap, effective. Here’s a viddy to help explain.
The problem with a single air lift is they can only lift water a short height. Conceivably, combining multiple air lifts within a larger pipe would allow one to lift any amount of water to any height required, provided you had sufficient air flow. This idea probably originated in ancient Persia, I’m not making any claims to it.
So, a hanging garden set up, where water is pumped to the top and there trickles down through multiple growing containers before eventually feeding back into the main reservoir, all built around a central multiple air lift is the problem that’s been bugging me for the past few weeks.
P.S. I awoke from a fever dream and drew this schematic! Cool, no?
Awesome idea! I’ve been toying with airlifts for a bit myself, they’re a lot of fun. But, I hadn’t thought to chain them together to get more height, this I will have to try! One of these days I intend to whip out the ‘ole Kill-A-Watt and find out how efficient they are versus a traditional impeller water pump. Anyone happen to have or know where such data might be floating around?
We were just scrounging around this morning at Eyebeam to try to find one to get a final count on the draw here and it seems to have walked. Anyone here in New York have a Kill-a-watt we can borrow?
Why not just use air pressure to push the water up instead of using bubbles? You won’t have the efficiency issues and you can run the air pump less.
Tim, please say more. how would you use air pressure?
I think Tim is proposing that you have the plant feeding tube coming from the bottom of an airtight reservoir, and use an air pump to increase the air pressure inside the reservoir to push the water/nutrient up the feeding tube. The big problem I see is that you would need some way to get the water back into the sealed reservoir.
If you just had one grow bottle (or a manifold of bottles at the same height), you could just have the grow bottle fill from the bottom and drain down the same tube the way it came up as the air pressure decreased from a pinhole in the upper part of the reservoir. I have seen several systems like this on Instructables. This one that uses a solar heated black painted bottle as a reservoir/pump is one of my favorites:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Solar_Thermally_Pumped_Hydroponic_System/
I found Jackson’s blog and it is awesome. His work on airlift is on page 48 of Jackson on superforesters. He watched videos on youtube about airlift before he “got his hands dirty” and I have to say his progress rate with his prototype was pretty amazing. http://superforest.org/author/jackson/ and just find page 48 and a couple of pages back an forth. He also has videos including his airlift experiments at http://vimeo.com/superforest/videos
Brian