by Joe
Container suggestion – flower pots
3:57 pm in Uncategorized by Joe
It occurred to me the other day that terracotta pots would be a good container for a window farm for the following reasons:
1. They already have a wide top opening and a center hole in the bottom.
2. Terracotta is a tough material that won’t degrade when exposed to sunlight or water.
3. They are opaque which will discourage algae growth.
The disadvantages are:
1. They are heavy, unless you use plastic flower pots.
2. They reduce the amount of recycled material used in construction.
3. Terracotta can chip, crack, or break, which would cause leaks.
Problems can be solved…
1. Suspend them with proper chains.
(he ones I use have welded links and tested to 50Kg.)
2. On the other hand, you arent using ‘non-degradable’ or materials that pollute nature.
3. And you think plastic water bottles are that solid?
There’s one problem with these instead of the standard bottle-on-top-of-bottle WF design, and that is ‘splash’. Liquid dripping from thetopmost pot will gather some speed and splash, spreading fine droplets all over, when they land on the pellets in the lower pot. I know because I have this problem in my WF. (It’s partially solved by lowering the level of pellets, and partially by adding corks with glued-in tubing to some of the ‘pots’.
Ading some sort of ‘vick’ to lead the moisture down can also work. (A piece of string is enough, if the hole in the pot is small)
In fact, I wouldn’t mind using terracotta pots in my WF, except for the price.
They also are porous in nature and absorb water and minerals.
True. But if you don’t want the permeability you could use glazed or plastic flower pots.
Heavy, prone to cracks, splashing water … all of this once again brings us to another option: the use of funnels.
We still haven’t had a completed WF made of funnels, but I’m not giving up hope !
Yea, there is one of just funnels out there. Stainless steel I believe. Don’t remember where it was or what it was called, but it is out there.
Found it: http://our.windowfarms.org/members/vedette/activity/19074/