I started working on this one several months ago, before the airlift system edged in with it’s sleek design and lower price point, but ended up moving house in the meantime and having to scrap my original plans. Luckily I moved to a place with great windows, so here is my old skool WF.

It’s still in process, I haven’t been able to work out the timers because my pump (QuietOne 3000)  is *too* powerful: it drains the bottom reservoir in about twenty seconds, and the timer I have only works at one minute intervals, minimum. So basically I just turn the pump on for a few seconds three or four times a day, for now that’s fine but I’m in the market for some fat drain pipe, it seems the only way to hold enough water + nutrients so the pump can cycle through a full minute. Plus I want to house the pump inside the reservoir. But you can see the plantings are doing pretty well, I have enough greens for sandwiches and salads a few times each week. Everything was started from seed using Bio Rooters.

Basil seems to love this method, the thyme is growing slowly so I don’t know if that’s a keeper or not.  Spinach is a bit leggy, but butter lettuce, frisee and arugula are doing fantastically well. I’m hoping to figure out the lighting situation come autumn so I can have green stuff growing all year ’round.

I started with drippers that were billed as 0.5 gallons/hour but they clogged all the time so I switched to 1 gallon/hour and they work great, haven’t stopped up yet.

There were enough leftover parts to get a good start on an airlift system, so I’m going to try some sungold tomatoes and more basil, radicchio, fennel for its purtyness, some vining nasturtiums and maybe even strawberries, since I am very impressed by the intrepid berry growers here on the site. I’m working on an integrated tubing/support and if it works i’ll post the evidence.

I had problems with my account and could not figure out how post for several months, so all the step-by-step problem solving I had planned to post all along has been superseded by all y’all but thanks for everyone’s help. This has been an incredibly fun and rewarding obsession, and I’m getting to know the folks at the hardware store really well (yo, parkrose!).

Okay, as requested by Britta, here’s the introduction to a piece of equipment that may provide a cheap solution to a problem that those of us who chose to use a setup featuring a comparatively powerful aquarium pump have:

How to reduce the interval to a minimum when it’s not about a steady drip, but quick flushes.

The Lucky Reptile Easy Timer doesn’t need specified switch-on times to be set – it’s enough to program an interval and the duration of the power-on time.  The shortest interval is 15mins, the shortest power-on times are a mere 15/30s.

As I haven’t got an aquaponics setup, that should be enough time for the pump to push the entire content of my reservoir through the system once.

Lucky Reptile is, as you will have guessed, a German company, but the timer is apparently also readily available in the UK. I was unable to find comparable entry-level products, quite surprising, given the number of foggers operated by lizard and orchid lovers around the world.

Mabye someone else knows of one, and can add it here!

This video was taken more recently on March 30th, 2010:

silox – 1st Week Progress and 2nd Vertical Plant Tower w/ New Plants – March 30th, 2010

This is an update after the 1st week of growing in the 1st vertical plant tower and after building/planting in the 2nd vertical tower of our hydroponic window farm.

We have learned a few things just in the 1st week of setting up, planting and running our hydroponic window farm that I would like to share with you.

*  Mentioned it in my last post, but I cannot stress enough, water quality is VERY IMPORTANT.  The first couple of days I used our city tap water to power the 1st vertical plant tower(before my first video/blog until 3/22/2010).  This was also before I purchased a simple PH testing kit.  The electronic ones are nice, but I stuck with the manual method using a small container and drops to gauge the PH for costs reasons, plus I don’t think I’ll have to use it that often due to the reservoir sizes and the water I use now.  I tested the PH of the city tap water I was using and it was over 7 which is not good. Aside from an unbalance PH, the city tap water also contains chlorine, flouride, other chemicals and various minerals.  Even though water can be naturally dechlorinated by letting it sit 24-48hrs in an uncovered bucket, you still have to worry about all of the other nasty stuff and the PH of the water.  Now, I could go through the trouble of filtering my water which I may do in some form or fashion in the future, but I find it easier and cheaper to purchase RO(Reverse Osmosis) water locally from 1 of the 2 sources less than a mile away which I did and I can happily say I’m now using it.  Right out of the gate, the PH was perfect and no impurities whatsoever.  An unbalanced PH can cause the plants to stop uptaking some or all nutrients in order to protect itself(from what I’ve read), same with all of the other chemicals inside the water.  We do have some indoor AC units that collect several gallons of condensation daily in collection containers when they are working hard all day to cool down the apartment, so we will probably look into using that water instead when the time comes to keep them on.  We are also considering purchasing an atmospheric water generator such as an Ecoloblue which also collects water from the atmosphere/humidity in the air, but also filters it afterwards which allows it to be used for drinking/cooking etc(7-8 gallons a day!) and the hydro reservoirs.

* Adequate lighting is also very important to keep the plants photosynthesizing which equals produce!  I think it’s probably safe to say that most window farms will probably not have 100% of the needed light to produce as quickly or as much as most people desire, but I could be wrong here.  That is certainly the situation in our setup and while we try to use the natural sunlight when it’s available for a few hours a day, we’ve supplemented to make up for the lack of desired light.  We added a 4ft 54W florescent bulb complete with reflector to our window farm and attached to the sliding glass door facing the vertical plant towers.  We reshaped the reflector to open up and allow for light to be casted almost 180 degrees towards the side of the plants which I believe really helps the light be as efficient as possible and keeping unwanted light from shining out of our window towards the neighbors.  You can tell the plants really are reaching to grow towards the light, so much that I’m going to need to move the vertical plant tower back just a hair to keep them from touching it, hehe.  I have the light on a timer for 12hr on/12hr off(6:30am to 6:30pm).

* Attaching the wooden dowels that support all of the plant containers on the vertical plant tower to the reservior for extra support sounded like a good idea at first, but presented some logistical maintenance problems later on.  We corrected this by mounting a aluminum L bracket (the kind designed to hold up a simple shelf) to the top of the window area so they wooden dowels can held straight up via a hook driven into the top of the dowel and inserted into a hole on the end of the L bracket.  All of the weight of the plants/dowel is resting on the floor via the bottom of the wooden dowel and the hook/L bracket assembly is to keep it from tipping over.  This allows for us to easily move or rotate the vertical plant tower and remove the reservior for water maintenance(water replacment and cleaning).  This will also allow me to move the vertical plant towers back some from the light as I mentioned above with a simple modification or two.

* We are using the caps that came with the bottles and recreated the holes in them to be smaller directly in the middle of the cap.  The plan does not call for these caps AFAIK.  Why did I use them?  To keep water from splashing out of the containers onto the floor.  Without the caps or using caps with large holes in them allows for water to flow unevenly which results in droplets that are thrown out the container and that adds up quickly over a few days.  I recut the caps to use a smaller hole(5mm) and this seems to work very well.

Recap of plants we have growing, locations and dates planted

Plants on 1st vertical tower(far left) from top to bottom – planted on 20100321:
1. Butterleaf Lettuce
2. Green Beans
3. Strawberries
4. Jalapenos

Plants on 2nd vertical tower(middle or right) from top to bottom – planted on 20100330:
1. Brussel Sprouts
2. Cauliflower
3. Broccoli
4. Eggplant

I thought it would be interesting to do a little math on the cost to run the light and pump.  With my current setup(1x 54W florescent light and 1x Petco 9904 pump), assuming a 30day month and $0.15/KWh power rate, it costs a mere approximate of $3.50 a month to run the light 12hrs a day and the pump non-stop.  Not bad!!

Our future plan is to put a 3 vertical plant tower in the same window on the far right.  In order to do so, we will need to purchase another 4ft 54W florescent light w/ reflector(lights can be daisy-chained together out of the box), another air pump and 4 more 1.5L Ozarka water bottles.  We pre-purchased all of the other materials with the expectations of creating at least 3 vertical plant towers total.

Will try to post an update in about a week’s time.  Happy window farming!

To avoid confusion, this video was taken on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 and was just now uploaded.

silox – Initial Setup and 1st Vertical Plant Tower – March 21st, 2010

The initial setup and after planting in the 1st vertical tower of our hydroponic window farm. Our hydroponic window farm is located in our apartment sliding glass door area somewhere in Texas We are very excited to see how our hydroponic window farm turns out and learn from our experiences. We want to use our knowledge we gain from this to setup a much a larger aquaponics setup(aquaculture + hydroponics) down the road when we move into a house.

This configuration is based from the 3-container, air lift instructions found on windowfarms.org.  We tried to get away with 5 containers, but that seemed to be too high for the water to make it(tried 1 and 2 air tubes).  We settled for 4 per tower(1 more than what the plan calls for).  We also tried getting away with just one air pump tube to power this vertical plant tower, but ended up using two like the plans call for.  I think you might be able to get away with using just one if you were to buy separate, better quality one-way air valves instead of using the ones that came with the Petco pump as each one certainly seems to provide different amounts of air resistance (tested by blowing through each one before installation).

What we are using:
- Petco 9904 Air Pump(4 air outlets and kit includes one-way air valves)
- 1 Gallon or more reservior(8L or about 2 gallons in my case)
- Various surgical type tubing, but most importantly reinforced tubing for bringing water from the reservior to the top to prevent kinking in the line
- Wooden dowel to attach 1.5L plastic water bottles to
- Sports ball air needles (1 for each air line coming from Petco air pump)
- 3″ net cups for plants
- Hydroton(or equivalent) expanded clay pellets for growing medium
- 4ft 54W flourescent light bulb w/ ballast and reflector(reshaped to redirect near 180 degrees on one side)
- Timer for light to keep it on 8-12hrs(depends on cycle of plants and natural light availability)
- Water(Qualtify makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE). Get Reverse Osmosis water if at all possible or something equivalent. Make sure PH is right(between 5.5 and 6.5) and it’s pure.
- Botanicare Pure Blend Pro Grow Nutrients(Organic) for all vegitation phases of growth
- Botanicare Pure Blend Pro Bloom(Organic) for fruiting of plants(haven’t used yet and may not be necessary, so we’ll see)

Plants on 1st vertical tower(far left) from top to bottom:
1. Butterleaf Lettuce
2. Green Beans
3. Strawberries
4. Jalapenos

We will try to post an update once a week for now until we at least harvest most of these vegetables to show trials and tribulations to get to that point(we are hopeful we will make it that far, lol)

We are almost there on kits, Folks. We would love your input on a couple of things.

For more about why we are making kits, read this.

Here’s how kits are looking.

You will choose between a 2-column or 4-column windowfarm. You WILL have to be able to screw at least 4 screws into your upper window sill. The bottom bottle of each strand will be the reservoir.
We will probably produce the first batch by hand ourselves here in the Brooklyn shop but the next batches may be handled by an awesome little organization that hires the disabled just North of the city.

Get a sneak peek of the one we have in Brooklyn headquarters here.

Major points up for debate:
1) To give you the bottles or ask you to supply your own. If you supply your own, you need to drill through the tough end very precisely and this can be a dangerous task with a drill or a red hot cylinder. However, sourcing the bottles and getting them to you is very expensive on our end. What do you say? Would you be willing to pay a premium to not have to find, drill, cut, and paint your own bottles?

2) To include the pump or not. The petco pump is the best one we have found and it comes with air valves. However, some people have found that their pumps are duds. Having to deal with Petco’s duds will be a big burden on us that will take away from our mission work. We’d prefer to simply have a button while you are buying you kit that you press to order your pump from Petco separately. Is this a deal killer?

3) Lights. Almost everyone really needs them but no one ever wants to get lights. That is, until after they start raising their little baby plants and the plants come out looking leggy/scrawny. You can pump them full of nutrients but if they don’t have enough light to process the nutrients through photosynthesis, it is very sad =<. Anyway, I'm thinking we will sell lights as a separate kit. You would buy individual strands. Sound good?

Also, if you have a great business mind, experience with this kind of production setup, and some time to volunteer, we would love to hear from you. Send me a message by finding Britta under members.

I started my WindowFarm about a month ago, working on it in my spare time. I wanted to interface it with a microcontroller for automation and used the ATMega168 (same as on the Arduino) to control a windshield wiper pump to move water through the system for 4 seconds every 10 minutes.

The construction of the actual WindowFarm setup is IMO pretty terrible-looking and very sloppy. I just wanted to get something working though, and the plants don’t seem to mind.

Here is a picture of the circuit:

And here is a picture of the complete WindowFarm:

I wrote a little bit of code for a Fonera Fon2100 router I had lying around, making the modifications to the OpenWRT firmware (version 8.09.1) running on there. It gives its web-interface a ‘Sensors’ link that AJAX-updates the analog pin values from the Arduino. Right now on my setup it is all just noise except pin 0 which has a photosensor on it that gives light readings near the window. It is the plan to turn on the lights in an 18-hour window if the light value falls below some threshold.

Here is a screenshot of OpenWRT’s modified web-interface:

I have the code for the Arduino sketch as well as the OpenWRT changes here: http://github.com/nemik/arduinoponics and more photos of the setup on my Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nemik/sets/72157622608195083/

I’m going to try to automate this more and more, hopefully also fix the construction.

Open to any suggestions or criticisms!

This gets way nerdy on the pump/plumbing of the Reservoir System. Beware. If you are super nerdy, this is where you can jump in and start making this system better!!

Your reservoir system is a liquid circuit controlled by a pump on a timer. The pump needs to only pump water, not air. Running a water pump dry will kill it. The relationship between the amount of time your pump is turned on by the timer and the gallons per minute flow of your pump dictates a minimum amount of water in your system and, therefore, a minimum size for a sewer pipe reservoir.

However, there is plenty to tinker with here.

Here are notes from my thinking when I wrote that part of the Reservoir system How-to. They are notes that I have not really edited, so ask questions if something is unclear,

Theoretically, let’s say our pump pumps 500gph. That’s about 8.3 gallons per minute. We have decided that we lose about 25% to the curve at the top of the reservoir, and we probably lose about 10% to any remainder at the bottom that is too low for the pump intake. That means that when the bottom reservoir is as full as it can be, only 65% of the water in the tube can actually cycle through the system. So, 65% has to be at least = 8.3 gallons, which means the total pipe capacity if completely full has to be 12.8 gallons.

The pipe formula is

length of pipe = volume in gallons/0.00432900433 x Pi x radiussquared

so when the radius is 4” for the sewer pipe with 1/8” thick walls, the minimum pipe length formula is

GPM/0.21759949= min pipe length

For this 500 GPH pump, minimum pipe length for a one-minute pump-on cycle with the timer we have recommended is

8.3/(0.00432900433 x 3.14159265 x 16)=

8.3/0.21759949

= 38.14”

and if you want it to rest inside the window sill, that has to have the pump length added to it, which puts us at more like 40”

A typical window is 36” wide. So:

1- Maybe we don’t need this fancy a pump because we are only pumping up about 4+- feet of head. Maybe we could find one that would fit inside the reservoir so we don’t have to suspend it outside.

2- If we still want to use this pump, we should have people make them wider than their windows and suspend them outside the windowframe.

3- ??

RESEARCH—

Ecoplus pumps correlated with head and cost are here: http://homeharvest.com/hydroponicpumpssubmersible.htm

(CAUTION: BE of these pumps-

(CAUTION: BE of these pumps-

by jayt