BLOG ENTRY 7 – THE CUCUMBERS LIVE

Thursday, 23rd June 2011

After the big scare, the cucumbers decided they wanted to live. It was definitely the food level in the water. I lost all of my “newly born” cucumbers which are wilting away further like little raisins. But the two big ones are going strong again and the whole plant is nice and perky again. At least I now know why.

They really did need food, but I didn’t understand why, until I used a flashlight down my food tube. The tomatoes have squirmed their roots through the half a cm hole in the bottle cap that goes into the tube and have grown a whole root forest in there. I can’t kill of these roots, because that will probably kill my three tomato plants. But it does mean I’ll have to feed more often, since the tomato plants are taking a LOT of the food directly from the reservoir instead of through the dripping. Smart plants.

Bit sad I’m left with 2 cucumbers instead of the 8 that I had before, but I’m hopeful to get some more female plants I’ll be able to pollinate.

BLOG ENTRY 6 – MY CUCUMBERS ARE WILTING

Tuesday,  21st June 2011

I have no idea what is going on. Yesterday they were fine and the 2 cucumbers already on there were growing rapidly. This morning I got up and the plant is completely wilting. Leaves are drooping. The kind of drooping you get from either too little or too much water. It’s not too little water. It may have been too much, but since I let it dry out all day, it should’ve already started looking a little better. It hasn’t….

I do not understand. It’s getting the same water it got before, which aerates with airstones for at least 24 hours. The PH is stable, the EC is stable. The food is the same. The leaves have no noticeable marks on there. There is the one leaf with a big brown spot on there, but that’s been on there for over a month. Some small spots here and there, but they’ve been on there for quite a while as well.

I cleaned out the reservoir today and refilled it completely with a fresh batch. If it was something in the water, then it’ll be better by morning. If it’s not then my plant is probably dead in two days.

I dislike not knowing what it is dying of, because it means I can’t change a thing about it. I may put new cucumber plants in, but since I don’t know what is going on, chances are they’ll die too. Bah… Let’s hope somehow the plant will be better by morning and that my tomatoes and paprika’s don’t go down the same road.

BLOG ENTRY 5 – UPDATE ON PLANTS AND FIXED WEAKNESS OF PULSER

Monday, 6th June 2011

So… another update. You can find some plant close ups at the bottom of this blog entry.

• The weak point of my low water level pulser design has always been the single part that actually made it work so well: the check valve. The type of check valve I use now, has also been the biggest “invisible” change to my windowfarm as of yet. I can not stress enough the importance of check valves that WANT to let through water and air with little to no effort. After DIY’ing a couple, testing some others and a lot of frustration, I finally found one on ebay that works! Just look for “Plastic check valve” on ebay and look for the ones in the pictures below (the full name of the ones I bought was “plastic check valve water air gas unilateral model new”. The cool thing about these is that you can screw them apart and actually make the opening in the rubber thing bigger so that it lets through the amount you need. FINALLY check valves that keep on working. It took me quite some effort but I’m happy with how it’s working now. And of course the fact that it’s working continuously. The pump is on its lowest setting. And the system actually started dripping on it’s own within 1 minute. Never had that with the other check valves. Anyway, we’re also getting really good at getting the little pulsers out of the tube and in again, hope we don’t have to do it again any-time soon though.
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• The white tape on the tube helped tremendously with the temperature issues.
• Jiffy pots work so much better than the rock-wool. Plants are much happier.
• The air-curtain aerating the water in the PVC tube was a great idea, no more algae and the adjustments (PH, nutrients) get mixed in very thoroughly, making the adjustments a breeze. It did create another issue though: The system I had to close of the watering hole in the PVC tube (piece of tube cut open and sliding over the hole) wasn’t intended to keep in splashing water. The air curtain spluttered water bubbles to the bottom of my sliding door, and this just ran in between the tube and the slider into the heater. NOT good. Fixed it by putting a plug in it instead.
• FAILURE with aircurtain:
• SUCCES with aircurtain :
• Also the little aluminium foil curtains on the bottom bottles have probably helped.
• The balloon sock did not function the way we intended from the start. The sharpness of the metal tightening rings burst through the balloons relatively quickly. So we removed the little suckers again rather quickly after the previous blog post since we were getting rust in the system again. When we removed them, we immediately tried three different ways of “sealing” the tightening rings to prevent any rust getting in the nutrient solution. There is one that worked really well: putting little socks on the screws and around the rectangular part to make them less sharp. After that we shoved over parts of a bigger balloon (look at the picture to see the type that worked best)  and closing off if necessary with the part of balloons you blow through. (so first a little pink “end of balloon” over the screw, then the yellow bigger part over that, then the orange sock, then little balloon rings if necessary)
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• I ditched the T-splitters in most of the bottle caps and they’re just dripping where they want. I kept them in untill the plants were mature enough to actually poke out of the bottle. After that I just let it drip wherever it wants, as long as it’s somewhere inside the bottle.
• The lettuce died, not much luck with lettuce so far. The paprika, cucumber and tomatoes are doing very well. Finally got 2 female flowers on the cucumber plant, so pollinated those. Also “vibrated” the few flowers on the tomato plants to pollinate them as well. Hope we’ll get some fruits soon.
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BLOG ENTRY 4 – UPDATE ON AIRLIFT

Monday, 25th April 2011

It’s been a while, so it’s time for a little update:

1. On the first run, one pea plant survived, that created one pea pod, with four whole very yummy peas.
2. Water + Rock-wool cubes + Sunny spot = Algae
3. Two out of the three airlifts worked continuously, one was pigheaded.
4. The gray PVC tube got too hot, because of it’s location behind a southern faced window. Result: water got too hot, bad for plants.
5. The gray PVC tube was not light proof, so algae came to live there
6. The drippers dripped on top of the plants, the plants did NOT like that.

So I’ve had many issues. But that’s a good thing, because I learned a lot. Today the system was updated to fix (hopefully) all of the issues we had above. Each number above, corresponds with the same one below.

1. Well, no problem here, picked the pea pod, happily ate the peas, removed the plant, cleaned out the bottle and put it back. Then planted some new babies.
2. Don’t like algae, so this time I took jiffy pots, filled them with regular soil and planted my new seeds in there. We now have a few very sturdy young green-lings, namely: cucumber plant that creates round and yellow cucumbers, an old and sweet cherry tomatoes plant, mustard salad, red paprika’s. They’ve made the move today, so lets see what happens this time.
3. Opened the tube today (big undertaking) and got all the airlifts out to see what the problem was. Also hoped it would give me some insight into why the other plants withered and the pea plant did in the end as well. It did, I had rust on the tightening rings of the airlifts. That together with the thriving algae population kind of ruined the feeding water for my plants. The one airlift that had died, had muck inside of it. So I took each airlift apart, cleaned it out completely, reassembled and put a “balloon sock” around the iron parts to prevent further rusting. Pictures below. Let’s see if all the lifts keep on working this time.
4. The hot water, another reason plants died. Fixed it by taping the whole thing with white tape, twice. Sucky job, but the tube was off anyway and it was worth it, the water stayed noticeably cooler today and it was a hot day. Let’s hope the temperatures stay within tolerance limits of the plants this time.
5. I’m kind of hoping the two layers of tape will also help with the light-proofing of the tube, keeping algae at bay. The bottles leaking back into the tube also got little skirts of tape+aluminum foil. So there is almost no light getting through there anymore either. I also put in an aircurtain over the length of the tube so the water moves continuously. This should also help with the algae. There are two additional benefits though: the roots of our plants will get more oxygen and any solutions added to the tube (food, PH correction) will get nicely mixed around.
6. I put T-Splitters in each bottle-cap, guiding the water to the sides of the bottles. That way they wont drip onto foliage nor in the soil pots. Since I’m using soil I know that soil that is too wet equals fungus, so the “foliage evasion plan” had the nice bonus of making sure the pots wouldn’t get saturated and hopefully I won’t get the fungus issue.

So there, the problems, and their solutions, I hope. I’ll add some pictures below of the “improved” airlift. When I find the time tomorrow, I’ll take some pictures of the T-splitters, the skirts and some of the new plants.

The reason for the different colors is because each “column” has a color code (red, green and yellow, but only had one red balloon ) to make sure each bottle goes back into the same spot. I had to do this because of the way I used to attach them to their column. The result is that when a bottle would go back in a different spot, it wouldn’t hang straight. The pumps have the same colors as the columns. If there were to be an issue an issue with a certain column’s airlift, I can detach all three and still find the right one. Because of the tube design, when something is amiss, I usually need to remove more than one airlift.

BLOG ENTRY 3 – PICTURE OF MY WINDOWFARM

Tuesday, 1st February 2011

It’s all starting to come together. Today I finally finished my tube reservoir and mounted it with the help of my hubby. He figured out a knot that wouldn’t slide on the internet and made it work!

Anyway, I had a few issues finding materials that would work here in Belgium. My opinion of our DIY stores isn’t all too high, since finding stuff there can be a challenge. The stuff that was used:

• 5mm cabled cord – ball-chains were not in our diy stores, and on the net they were too expensive
• two plant guide sticks cut into 14cm pieces to poke through the bottles
• metal wire, wound above and below each plant stick, first poked through the string to stay in place
• evian water bottles
• aluminum foil – since I don’t have any place where I can paint bottles I just stuck aluminum foil to each bottle, since that is perfectly lightproof too. It works well.
• 1 meter pvc tube, 10cm diameter, with stoppers and such so I can screw off the ends to refresh the water
• screws and metal washers, to screw the strings on top of the wooden box-thing that holds the curtains up (I just melt the end of the string, open the string up by turning, shove a screw in between and tighten)

That’s about it. If anybody would like a more detailed view of how it looks, just ask and I’ll add extra pictures. For now I can show you the picture below.

Btw, it took me quite a while to get the darned pvc piping water proof. Eventually I sanded it with quite coarse sanding paper, and then applied a VERY thick layer of pvc glue on both pieces. It took me two tubes to do it right and recovered a piece out of the second tube to try again before it worked.

BLOG ENTRY 2 – VIDEO

As promised a little video. Instead of making one of the pulsers I use for my 1m40cm tier, I made a new one for a 2 meter one. After the video was made, I lowered the water level even more to 5cm, it’s still working. This is going a lot better than I had hoped.

I also added a picture, so you can see the changes. The outer tube is now 12 cm long and the “hole” has moved from the middle to right above the check valve. This way, the airtube will push down that end and the pulser can lay in a slightly angled position with the intake just a bit lower than the output. Rest is pretty much the same.

I tried making it work with my 9cm one, but it couldn’t cope with the two meters. I am pretty sure now that, that if I were to relocate the airholes on those too, it just might. I’ll test that tomorrow, it’s a bit late now. I also know I promised see through tubing all around, but the pulser just works a lot better with the stiffer black tubing to make the water go up.

IMPORTANT: The pulsers work continuously once they start up. At 1m40 it pretty much started itself, but at two meters they need a little help. To start these pulsers, the best thing to do is to let them fill up with water BEFORE you put on the pump and put in the line that goes up your bottles. Then you put on your pump, let it splutter out the water that was in, and suck a bit on the end until it starts dripping. Then it’ll drip with intervals from 1 second to 10 seconds in between each drip.

BLOG ENTRY 1 – LOW WATER LEVEL AIRLIFT GUIDE

First of a big thanks to Eileen@virlusun, who is also on this website and on youtube, for sharing her videos so freely. It’s because of her I understood the basic principle of how these pulser pumps work. Also a thanks to Tip & Laura from hydro-plans.com, it was their video that eventually gave me the idea of how to fix my conundrum.

My problem is that I have a water reservoir that can contain a maximum of 7,5cm of water and that the pulser pumps on here, tend to work only in deeper water levels. I have now fixed this, by using the simple T-shape design and putting in a one-way thingy for air pumps (dunno what it’s called ) to provide the “pressure” so to speak. I’ll show you what I mean by adding in some pictures.

The following was the prototype I made. It worked really well. So the day after I  went to get some tubing and some tightening rings to experiment a bit more.

The results of the experimentation is the following little manual:

0. The most important reason of why this pulser works, is the fact that there is NO air/water leakage whatsoever. The only way for the air to go is up, towards the top of the tier of bottles. And the only way for the water to go is inside the tube since the air going up will pull it in through the one-way air valve thing. Since the bigger 9cm tube creates a reservoir, it’s easy for the water to go up with the air once it’s filled up. This takes a minute or two.

It doesn’t need to be completely submerged, but I’ve found it works best when at least submerged half way when using it in vertical position, since the water will get in easier that way. I’m using it now in a bottle it’s only just under and it works great (about 1 drop/second and a lot more silent than the other systems I experimented with). Eventually it’ll go into a PVC pipe, 10cm diameter, hung horizontally. The pulser can work this way in as little as 2cm to 3cm of water, as long as the biggest tube and one-way air valve is submerged horizontally, it’ll work.

1. this is pretty much the material you’ll need. I just went with my airtube from the airpump to the store and found 3 other sizes of tubing that fit pretty much into each other. The biggest part is 9cm long. There’s also a balloon, a one-way air thingy, some tightening rings (you’ll need two per pulser), a hole poker set on the biggest one and a screwdriver.

2. Basically there is a natural curve to the tubing. Since I need the pulser to lay horizontally on the bottom of my very shallow reservoir (a 10cm diameter pvc tube), I need it to remain nice and flat. So if you put the tube piece down so the curve makes the mouth of a happy smiley I’ll poke the hole on the topside of that smiley, pretty much in the middle.

3.  Next step is easy, just shove the tubes into one another. Look at the curve of each tube to make it easier, and you can also use a little spit (or water if you find that disgusting ) to make it go in easier. After that put a tightening ring on, make sure the bolt of it is not in the way of it laying flat if you want to use it in a shallow water situation.

4. In these pictures you can see where each of the tubes is supposed to be in relation to one another. I’ve experimented a bit with this, and this seems to be the best setup. The one tube hangs “loose” inside of the bigger tube, so water can get around it making it easier for the water to get into that tube. Also the length of the biggest tube (the little reservoir), is of importance. A smaller tube will make for less and slower droplets. 9cm’s was a sweetspot, but feel free to conduct your own experimentations.

5. This step might not be necessary. I had to do it, because my one-way air valve was sitting too loosely in the big tube and it was hard to get a seal. Doing this fixed it easily.

Balloon almost on.

And done.

6. So, with the balloon wrapped around the one-way valve, you can shove it into the other end of the tube and secure it into place with a ring as well. Again make sure the bolt of the ring is not in the way of it laying flat, if you want to use it horizontally in a low water level situation.

7. And below the finished pulsers. You shove the airline of the pump directly into the hole on the side. The easiest way to do this, is to cut the tip in a slanted way, so you have a point to put in first, the rest will follow easy enough. Just put it in, until it hits the wall of the tube inside. I secure mine with a little washer made out off balloon-animal balloons (thanks again to Eileen@virlusun for that ingenious idea), to help it stay into place. In the top of the tube, you can put your line that goes up into your bottles. I haven’t tested it to go up over 2 meters yet, I planned to do this today, but got sidetracked; I’ll do it tomorrow or so, and otherwise somebody else can test it.