by BionicMel
How much water per minute/hour?
1:30 am in Uncategorized by BionicMel
Hello!
I am very excited to set up my window farm!
I managed to play around with my air lift with a airflow valve, and I have quite a range of drips.
My question is how much water should I be cycling through my window farm in a given period of time?
Also, is it better to have a steady slow drip or to have the pump on a timer and just run the water at certain intervals?
Thanks for your help.
Melissa
Hey, Melissa. Congrats. Excited to get you up and running. It’s a little bit of a customization thing as you first get started. It really depends on what kinds of plants you have growing, how old they are, and the microclimate conditions of your window. We leave it variable rather than giving out one solution for everyone because peoples’ conditions are different and the requirements change just a little with your plants as they grow. If your windowfarm is above a radiator and you are growing a bunch of big tomato or squash plants, your evaporation rates are going to be much higher. In general, plants require more water/nutes as they get older. Give yourself some room to experiment and try out different settings. When your seedlings are small, I would watch out for overly soaking them. I would play around first with the frequency with which the pump turns on via the timer. Try to get it as low as possible while still having your clay pellets always feel wet to the touch. Make sure your grow plugs are not soaking wet and try to move them so the seedlings’ little stems are not directly under the stream. Generally, it seems best to turn the pump’s dripping down pretty low while still making sure your airlift works well. You can always turn it back up. Just be sure that you are keeping your reservoir as full as possible if you turn your pump down low. The depth of the water column in the reservoir is critical to the height the air pump can deliver. If your reservoir water gets low and you have the pump turned down low, you will run a higher risk of the nutrient solution not making it to the top. As you play with it a little bit, you get a feel for what works best with your plants and your window, a bit like driving a stick shift car!
The windowfarms kits come with seven day mechanical timers with 48 on/off settings per day. That allows you to set 15 minute intervals. You can sometimes find these timers at normal hardware stores, but they are sometimes expensive at retail proces and in my experience it takes a lot of hunting. Try mcmaster-carr if you can’t find them anywhere else near you. 4 out of 5 hardware stores only carry the ones with 12 or 24 on/offs per day. Those are okay for very hardy plants that can take being doused and then going bone dry over and over again but your range of plants is just going to be more limited. At some point soon, we may start selling these individually but we can’t really afford to yet.
Ok, thanks for the lead!
So after learning this, I should probably group my plants by water requirements in the towers.
I’ve also been wondering about how much water is going to need to go through once my seedlings are in the cups.
Since the pump doesn’t have any visual way to set water amounts, I added a setting marker: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mookmonkey/5331679675/in/photostream/
I’m still having really inconsistent throughput between two two columns, but think I’ll just plant the more thirsty things in the wetter column rather than make it some issue that I have to solve. The lower the pump setting, the more different the water flow is between the two. I think this variable will take a lot of trial and error to nail down.
Still, could somebody give us an estimate of how much L goes through a column?
If a system (other than an airlift) would periodically put water in the top, what would be the biggest amount and longest interval that would still work?
i would say its some fine tuning for the first days. try 2 “on-intervals” on your 15 minute/d timer a day, if the plants need more (judged by looking and feeling the clay pellets), add another 15 minutes of water flowing through the system. thats how i would do it…
Mine is pumping 1/2 mL a minute per column when the pump is on.
sorry i mean per second