If you've been following along with my garden update series for
2020 then you'll know about my monster chili plant that I have growing inside a grow tent. it's inside an ebb and flood
hydroponic system that I designed and built and in today's video
I'm gonna show you how I did that. you're gonna first need some boxes
This one here will be used for the reservoir
You need quite a big box so that you don't have to keep changing out the nutrients all the time
This one cost about 10 pounds from Ikea with the lid
So it's about 12-13 US dollars and this one here will be for on top
Which is where the grow media will be as well as the plant and that
Was about six pound or about eight-nine US dollars. to keep this simple in this video. I'm gonna just be using a normal
off-the-shelf timer
That'll make life a lot easier for you rather than having to try and build a system
I will be building something for this
but I know that not everyone wants to go and do some coding and
Create little electronic devices
So you can just buy one of these timers make sure it's digital so that you can control the minutes
some of the mechanical ones only allow you to do half-hour increments and
That's gonna be way too much for what we're going to be doing. So timer
We're gonna need a small pump. I got a mains voltage pump. So this is just a small aquarium pump or
Water feature pump and I think that cost me about five or six pounds. So there really are not expensive
We're going to need some pipe to connect to the pump
This here is a 3d printed part that I designed and it's available to download if you're on my patreon on a particular tier
So if you do want to print this you can go and download it there
It is a scaled up version of one that I designed last year for a smaller system that I had running inside my greenhouse
So you probably would have seen that a few times. I did talk about it during my grow update series and
That's just scaled up and
Reinforced in a few places so it should be a bit stronger but the one from last year was actually perfectly fine as well
essentially what this allows me to do is
Easily pump water up through this and flood the system and then drain quite easily back down without things like that
blocking up any of the holes so you can see there's some holes everywhere at the top there's an overflow and
Yeah, it works quite well, and I'm pretty happy with it
And then we're gonna need a few of these nylon nuts and bolts and you'll see what those are for in just a second
Lastly you're gonna need a drill and you're gonna need a few bits which are gonna help you with actually putting this all together
The basic concept of how the system will work
There is this little space over here which this fits over perfectly but instead of letting it move around we're going to actually secure it
with these little guys over here, so we need to drill some holes underneath and
We're gonna get that secured to the top of this
then
the one change I have made to this system or the will change I'm going to make is the fact that
In the one that I have inside the grow tent I have two of these
sitting on there
The challenge comes when the starts getting bigger
It gets quite difficult to open this up and actually service this. Also I don't need two of these
On here because the plants grow so big as it is
So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna have one positioned over here this side here
I'm just gonna cut it
So it's a bit of a flap and allow me to very easily
Change out the nutrients clean it up and do any sort of servicing I need to do
If you want you can put a dab of silicone in between the
Screws and the plastic, but honestly, I haven't seen any problems. There has been no leaking or anything
The next thing we need to do is place this because we're only gonna have one plant in here
don't go and place it in the middle because
Ideally, you want your plant in the middle so that it can spread its roost nicely
So with this put it towards the one end and that'll be perfect
So I think around about there drill it from the bottom because as you can see there's a bit of a honeycomb design
At the bottom here so drill in between one of the honeycomb patterns will make life a lot easier for you
And again, you can put some silicone down there if you want. I really haven't noticed any problems with it
But that's up to you a good place to put it is just around the edge
You see this part here actually comes out it's removable and
It was just because it made a lot easier to print if you could do this separately
And that just slots in there that's a nice tight fit so it shouldn't be going anywhere.
So let's test this little pump and see how it does I'm fairly confident it'll be fine. I haven't actually tested this specific one
I try a variety whatever is cheap at the time so it's easy to replace if there are any problems
But let's give this one a go
And there we go we can see it
Coming through quite easily. So more than happy with that
Of course, this is gonna fill up a lot quicker when the clay pebbles are in
here, but this is just to do a quick test
Make sure the pump's working. Ebb and flood, or flood and drain systems are quite simple to understand and they work very well
Especially for my chili plants. I really enjoy this and
there's quite a few other big growers that use the same process and
Essentially what it's doing is it floods the media and then once you switch off the pump, which I'll do now
all the water is going to drain back through the pump and
There you go. It's your drain or your
So let's test to see how long it takes for the water level to reach to just below that overflow pipe
There's a problem this timer can only measure hours and minutes
So when we set a timer interval, I can only set it to go for 1 minute 2 minutes 3 minutes, etc
This took 1 minute 26 to fill up
what we need to do is try and get it to take 2 minutes and
That's one of the benefits of this specific pump
so if you are gonna do it this way, I would make sure that you have a pump like this which you can set how
much
Flow rate or power. It'll actually put out
Because that way you can turn it down and get it to a point that this takes two minutes to fill this up
One of the reasons I like to use my automation
My micro controllers is I have a far
better control over
how long I can switch these things on for so I can do it down to the millisecond if I really wanted to.
I had to turn the pump all the way down to be able to get this to fill up in two minutes
So that I can actually use this thing
You might get lucky and you might have a timer that can do seconds as well
Then you don't have to fiddle around like I've just done now. Of course. I've kept this very simple
I know a lot of you
Don't want to go too advanced with something like this and start fiddling with micro controllers and servers and things like that
But I'll talk through some of the things I'm going to be doing to this to make it just that much better
It does require obviously a little bit of electronics knowledge, but it'll make things so much easier
The first thing will be to put a horizontal float switch over here
And what that'll do is when the water level gets below a certain point it'll trigger
my micro controller and that will send me a message by email or Twitter or anything like that and
I'll get an alert saying that I need to come and top this up
The other thing I'm going to do of course is put the microcontroller in place so that I can turn the pump back
Up to full I want this to flood as quickly as it can because that's just much better for the plant
You don't want it to take too long. And that's about it, really.
There are a couple other things you can do
You can go put a heating element inside here if it is winter time where you are keep the water at a nice
27-28 degrees Celsius
This is the plant that I'll be putting inside this hydroponic system, it's a bit of a special one. It's a cross
I'm in the middle of creating between a piri-piri and an Aji Lemon Drop
That's a nice root system, and I'm sure it will do even better once we have it in the proper hydroponic system
This is now
Planted and it's going to be much happier being able to spread its roots
I got one last thing to do. I need to mix up the nutrient solution. I'm going to be using I
am using the general hydroponics nutrients and I'm just gonna mix it up as per the
recommendations on the bottle of nothing too special there
I will adjust the pH as well just to make sure that it's a little bit on the acidic side around about
six 6.5
There you go, the plant is in its final place the lights are on the timer 18 hours on six hours off and
I'm sure we're going to see a lot of progress over the next few weeks and over the course of the year
Make sure that you are subscribed if you want to see the progress of this plant in the system
I will update you guys on my garden update series and
That comes out every few weeks. I hope that you learned something
I hope that you enjoyed this video and if you have any questions, let me know in the comments below
I do my best to answer and until the next video stay safe and stay spicy