29 Oct
Building a home made ebb and flow hydroponic system
The idea is to replicate a expensive ebb and flow hydroponic system.
The ingredients (all bought from Home Depot)
- 1/2″ irrigation pipe – 50ft roll
- 1/4″ irrigation tube – 50 ft roll
- 8 x 1/2″ T fittings
- Pack of 10 of 1/4″ couplers
- 8 x 5 gallon buckets
- 19 gallon dark colored tote with lid
- 2 x large bags of perlite
- tube of silicon
- 170 gph aquarium or fountain pump
- aquarium air pump
- aquarium air stone
- aquarium water heater
- timer – multiple on off (need to be able to do 4hrs on then 4hrs off)
- hydroponic chemicals
- cable ties (25 pack)
This is the system how it will be laid out, 8 buckets filled with perlite and the nutrient tank with water pump, air pump and heater in it at the end. | Inside the nutrient tank, we have the water pump connected to a length of 1/2\" pipe, a air stone to aerate the solution and out of the pic is a water heater. | The cables come out thru under the handle, the air pump can be see cable tied to the side. Remember to put a no drip loop in the power cables or keep the cabled and air pump higher than the water level. |
The nutrient tank has he pump pipe coming out the top and the drainage pipe below it. | A closer look at the pipes in and out of the nutrient tank | This is the drainage pipe, put in by using a 1/2\" drill pipe and then silicon to secure it. |
Inside the bucket the drain pipe can be seen, this needs to be covered with screen material secured by a twist tie. | Nutrient, air rock, pump and heater | This is some of the containers with the inlet water pipes (found you need 1 pipe per plant). Thats perlite in the containers |
You can see the pipes in the middle of the pipes, the inlet or nutrient to the plant main pipe needs to be level and level with the top of the buckets for even flow I found. | I placed some window screen material over the end of the return pipe to stop it getting clogged with perlite. |
Posted by carl on 29.10.08 at 6:18 pm
Great use of WordPress, and I enjoy reading about and seeing your ingenuity. Found a link on Pinecam. One thing that I did with my WP site to make it easier to find topics is put a tag cloud in the sidebar. Only issue so far is that it takes a few mentions of a tag before it appears in the cloud. I resisted at first, but now find tags more flexible and useful than Categories.