I chose to build an ebb and flow system because it seemed easy enough from everything I had seen online. I didn’t have the right tools or the expertise to make something as simple as a compact hydroponics setup, so I ended up with an eyesore with way more pipes than necessary.
I started off with two plastic containers, a 18W pump and an overflow pipe like in a normal setup but this proved to be insufficient because the motor was powerful. It pumped more water than was getting drained and the system was unable to maintain the water at the desired level. I also realized that the height of the overflow pipe was smaller than it should have been. I had not accounted for the fact that I’d have to keep the plants suspended in the container and leave enough space for a strong root system to develop. I proceeded to make a couple more overflow pipes of the right length (I eventually realized one was enough) and clipped the previously made overflow pipe to maintain the nutrient solution at the right height when the system was flooded.
I then used thermocol to suspend the 3-inch net cups at the right height and used perlite as my growth medium – which I later found out was a mistake as smaller bits of perlite got dislodged when the system was flooded. A workaround was to use the pieces of cloth you see in the pictures as a filter so that they did not clog the motor.
I don’t get any direct sunlight in the balcony, thanks to the massive construction project 50 meters from my apartment so I had to use ‘grow lights’ for my plants. I placed them on the frame of an old chair that I’d removed the cushion from. At first, I bought an LED strip light because I wanted to use only the red and blue wavelengths of light but this turned out to be waste of money because their output was a meager 80-100 Lumen. Anything with a stronger output or that was individually addressable was far too expensive. So I decided to get rid of them and use LED tube lights. I used 3 of them which gives me a combined output of about 6000 Lumen at a distance of 28 cm from the plants, consuming 15W in total.
December 13, 2017
Fledgling Urban Farmer 