New window farmer, new draft design
10:01 am in Getting Started, made from scratch (without a kit), Materials and Resources, posts with pitcures!, Projects in Process, R&D-I-Y, Seeking Advice, Water flow by Deidre Miller
I’d like to do a nice looking window farm with wine bottles and copper pipes. I’ve drawn up a preliminary plan. Do the experienced window farmers have any advice? Do you think this would work?
any advice?
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Copper is very likely to react with the nutrients, might be dangerous, might be fine, (or use nutrients with no copper in them). There will be some green corrosion that will not look so pretty. Other than that, it looks great.
I’d thought about the corrosion, and I thought it would look cool. Also, once the corrosion forms, it will tend to prevent further reactivity, just as steel beams can be treated so that they have a protective layer of corrosion on the surface. Maybe I could pre-rust the copper pipes…
Thanks for the head-up on possible reactions with the nutrients. I hadn’t thought about that. I thought that since it comes in nutrient mixes, it would be safe. Hum… something to think about. Maybe pre-rusting the pipes would help with that as well.
Hey, you don’t happen to have any recommendations for pumps that are available for sale in the UK, do you? I don’t think I can use the American pump with British voltage.
Oh, and thanks for your thoughts and for replying so quickly!! I’m really enthusiastic about this idea.
You would have to get an adapter kit for an American 120v to British 220v. But any aquarium shop should carry air pumps.
The other issue with using copper pipe is that there is no way to make a seal between the glass and copper, without using plastic.
You could also look into IPEX, but that is some expensive stuff…
Maybe look into stainless steel? Can’t guarantee it will be cheap but it’ll be nice looking.
Thanks for your comments, Hardware Junkie. I wasn’t intending to make a seal between the glass and the copper. The bottles are supported vertically and stabilised by wire. The copper ends at the upper shelf. The water is carried upward by plastic tubing that’s hidden inside the copper pipe. Is there some kind of seal that’s needed that I’m not thinking of?
What kind of plants are you growing? The wine bottles look pretty small for growing anything but herbs. In my experience growing hydro for the past couple years, I have noticed, the bigger the net pot, the bigger the plants. I can get HUGE tomato plants in a few weeks with the largest net pot size for a 5 gal bucket. More than doubled all my harvests. What nutrients are you using? Have you thought about doing aquaponics? What are you doing to measure ph levels? I suggest using the largest size wine bottles you can find.
Deibre – do you have copper pipe going from bottle to bottle? Or is it just one piece that brings nutes to the top and they drip from bottle to bottle?
Thomas, I hadn’t got that far yet. I’m a beginner. As an engineer/designer, I work out my designs visually before I build them. However, I know nothing about the actual hydroponics, Ph levels, etc. Herbs are one thing I’d like to grow, but I’d love to be able to grow beans, peas, strawberries and tomatoes as well. The size of the planters is definitely something I need to think about. Any pointers on the farming part of this would be greatly appreciated.
Hardwarejunkie, the copper pipe would be continuous from the top of the window (there’s a horizontal, trapezoidal area right above) to the shelf underneath, which would have holes to let the wine bottles sit halfway through. There would be a hole drilled in each pipe at the level of the top planter to let the plastic tube stick out and drip the nutrients down. The nutrients would follow the outsides of the pipes down to the reservoirs. So, the water/nutrients would come up on the insides of the pipes (in plastic tubes) and come down on the outsides.
The pipes would have to hang from above in order to be able to guide the drainage into the reservoirs. That shouldn’t be too difficult to set up. I might have to do some things to make the whole thing more laterally stable, though.
What drives this is the configuration of the window. It’s recessed. The walls to my building are two foot thick stone. I drew an iso of the window, but I don’t see a way to embed the jpeg into this post. Try this…
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7033/6714712069_9b8de788e3_m.jpg
I’ll be building the shelves below, along with cabinet doors. It could potentially be very nice looking – no exposed plastic.
And, I am actually more concerned with the appearance of the plastic then about chemicals. I live in a flat and want a garden. My motivation is to be able to garden inside and to have a cool-looking installation in the window. I am a little bit of a greeny and I like my produce and try not to waste electricity, but I’m not a purist about either food or energy conservation.
You may also want to think about making your reservoirs larger. Smaller the reservoir, the faster you have to swap out/add nutrients/water.
Greg, yes, I was thinking about moving the reservoirs into the cupboard.
Then I could use larger ones and/or plastic.
OK nevermind what I was saying. In the picture it looked like you were connecting the bottles together using copper tubes.
Copper had crossed my mind as well. Don’t they use copper piping for household water lines? What keeps those from corroding?