The first thing I want to do is plot my holes for the net pots onto the system.
This system in particular is going to have six holes so I am going to go ahead
and cut those out right now with my 3 inch hole saw.
All right, so we now have all of our holes cut. All right, so the next thing I am going
to do is I want to lay out my pattern that I am going to be using.
So I will just grab all my fittings.
I got some t-joints and some 90° and I just want to layout where I want to have
everything sort of set. So the 90° are going to be on the edges,
all right.
The two joints --
All right, so what I have laid out here is sort of my pattern.
Now the 90° is going to create sort of the rectangle around the edge with like
the t-joints in the middle are going to connect up to create a center piece
and then this middle t-joint is actually going to point downwards and that is going to
connect to the reservoir pup in the bottom
and then I am going to use these two joints on the either side to create the lays.
So the next thing I want to do is cut the pipe for length so for this I am going to
use this pipe cutting tool that you can pick up at any home depot or whatever.
It cost about 10 bucks and I am going to use the length of the pipe so what I want
to do is measure out the length of the pipe that I am going to need for each of
the fittings.
Okay, so I am just about finished cutting up all my pieces, but what I want to do
before I move along is I want to dry fit everything and make sure it fits.
So all you have to do is just place all the pieces together.
I am going to go ahead and markup our final piece.
Get ready to mark your final piece.
What you want to make sure you do when you are doing your marking is you want to have
about a half a centimeter inside to about half a centimeter on the inside here as
well so let's go ahead and mark that there.
Right, so I am going to show you how the clamp works, but just basically pull the
clamp apart to reveal the blade and then find your mark and then you want to place
the blade right on to the mark by just compressing it and once it has got a grip
then all you got to do is just how to use it like scissors, right.
So you can get this last piece in.
That is going to take a little bit of wiggle always on the last pieces which
is a little harder.
So you get to see. We have our last bit of thing.
Now you can see one of the things that I have done is that I have made it slightly
smaller than the actual lid of the container. The reason for this is most buckets
actually get smaller on the inside so you want to make sure that it is going to go
in and out easily, yet that it is still going to provide coverage to all of your
net pots.
Now what I bought is these micro-spray heads. They give the 360° spray and what we are
going to do right now is mark out along the pipe where we want to drill the holes
for the spray heads.
So if we look at where our holes are for the net pots, we want to make sure that we
have equal coverage kind of everywhere so having one that right on top of the net
pot might not necessarily be good because as the roots grow down, they are going to
grow down and cover these so you want to make sure that they are sort offset, all right.
The other thing that you can do as well
is you can have different angles to have different coverage.
So what I am going to do in this case is I am going to put my marks with a Sharpie
wherever we think we want to have a spray that.
So I want one that coverage in between these two holes so I put a mark there.
I want to have coverage in between these two holes so put a mark there.
Here we are going to have coverage in between these two holes.
Then, we are also going to have coverage in between these two holes on this side
and between these two holes in this side.
We are going to make sure we have coverage here, okay and going along here
we are going to have coverage here,
coverage here and then we want to make sure that we do have some coverage on the
edges so we are going to put one here, here, here and there.
And that should give us a fairly even coverage, what we are looking to do
is just blanket for plants completely.
You could add a few extras if you want but like I said basically what we are
looking to do is make sure that they are not directly underneath the root system
otherwise the roots are just going to clog up and make these unusable anyways.
So you want to try to keep them away from the root system, but still with very good coverage.
In fact, I do think that we even have better coverage if I did add an additional
one here and additional one here as well
and this would provide a 360 to sort of all 4 pots.
So we are going to get a lot of coverage with this so let's go ahead and drill out
these wholes.
All right, now I know that the threading on these micro hoses are 532's so I am
gong to use my drill bit that matches that and what I am going to do is drill out
each one of these holes, but I want to be a little bit slow at it and make sure I
only go through the first layer.
I leave the system put together just to kind of provide me some support and you
want to make sure that you get somewhat bit on you don't want to be too cockeyed right.
So you just go through
and that is the last hole.
The next thing I want to do is I have a tap.
This is going to put the threading on that is the same thread as what is on this
bit here, okay.
So and that is going to create a 10/32 tap hole, and what I like to do for this
is I like to turn my drill to its lowest setting.
You can see how it is quite a bit slower
and we are going to be gently tap the whole and then reverse out and now you can
see we have a nice thread.
Just like that so I will go ahead and finish the rest of them.
All right so now that I have all my holes tapped what I want to do is address the legs.
So what we want to make sure is that when this sits inside the bucket that the spray
heads are going to evenly spray just slightly below the bottoms of each of the
net pots.
So in order to do this I will just take a net pot and kind of place it just slightly
below the edge of our container.
This matches the top of the bucket
and then I am going to measure up from the bottom and I can see from this that the
net pot bottom here is just at 9 inches from the top.
So I want to keep this again slightly below that 9 inch mark.
To accomplish that I also want to take into account how much pipe will be back
into this position.
So that is about a centimeter and a half-ish, right so if we had that for a 9
inch mark so it is about 8-1/2 inches.
So basically if I place 8-1/2 inches inside the bucket we are going to end up
just at that, just slightly below that 9 inch mark.
So now what we want to do is cut some 8-1/2 inch long pieces.
So what I will do is I will measure out 8-1/2 inches, place my mark and start cutting.
We are going to need four for this.
And we got our four legs.
All right so we got our four legs and what I want to do at this point is try to fit
those legs. So I will fit flip the unit over and we
are just going to turn each of our t-joints and we go ahead and place our
legs just like that.
Now the one thing you want to keep in mind is this entire system is going to have
water pressure running throughout. So unless we cap off the legs, then we
will actually have water shooting out of it and just become like a rocket take of
so just get your simple end caps and we will go ahead and cap off the legs.
All right, now that the legs are all capped off we can take the unit and fit it
in to our pail to make sure everything fits good.
You can see how we got a nice strong sturdy support so we can go ahead and get
ready to actually start cementing these. Basically, what you want to do is just
coat the edge with the solvent and then twist it into your fitting and then any
grips you can just clean up.
I usually suggest that you start with your easiest fittings first and then just move
on to the hardest fittings next.
So the thing I want to do now is fit this intake valve onto the bottom there.
You could do that much in the same way.
Just get a little of our cement and place it on like so and just press until firm.
And now we will be able to attach the hose to the bottom here.
At this point, you want to just let everything dry up.
It doesn't take long to set but I usually like to give it a good 24 hours to dry.
And now you can see that we have all the spray that is put into place, so all we
have to do right now is just go ahead and let this dry and then we can work on the
rest of it probably tomorrow.
One thing that you can do in the meantime though is you will notice that I have
started right now to sort of color this in with sharpie and black.
I think it is a really good idea just how to keep the light out.
If you have the ability to go outside and just spray paint the lid black I would
definitely suggest it, but if you get a big enough Sharpie you can see that it
is not going to take you all that long to get this painted black on the lid so for me I
am just going to go ahead and use a Sharpie to get the top black and you can
go ahead and do whatever you want.
All right we are back on day two and everything is nicely dry as you can see I
have all my emitters plugged in and now we are ready to deal with the actual feed
system for the pump.
So in order to do that much like my last project I did we are going to want to make
it notch in the bucket for our cable
and now we can have the cable just right inside blush with the top of the bucket.
So that takes care of our cable.
So I bought one of these half inch adapters and they just screw it right into
the top just like so and then I also have this half inch flexible tubing so what
happens is you just press fit right on to the system there and then we will just go
ahead and cut it to the length that we need to press fit it on to that side there
so put it in the system and go ahead and mark it right here.
Get a cutting tool and as you can see we just press fit it and to the system like so.
So now we have a good seal for the pump.
All right, so let's place it into our system and that looks about good there
and basically what we want to do now is find our water levels so this will be the
amount of nutrient that we need and the idea here is we don't need the nutrient to
come up very far, what we do have to be aware of is if you look at the side of the
pump here you can see that there is an intake and this is where the water
is going to come in through and go up to the top of the pump.
We want to make sure that the water doesn't drop below this level otherwise
you have potential of burning out your motor on the pump.
So when we set our water levels for the bucket we are going to want to make sure
that we haven't probably to about this level here, so just twice the amount of
water that is needed to cover this. That way when the spray had spray up we
will be able to drop the levels to a certain point.
All right so as you can see I have my fill line here.
This is a 25 meters.
If I was using this as deep water culture I would have to fill it up to 44 liters to
be able to get the same results so ultimately quite a bit of savings there.
So now that we have our system pretty much ready to go one thing I do want to
know is the fact that we do have a contained system meaning that reservoir
and the spray emitters are all in the same bucket.
That means that as the roots get longer and start growing down the task of
spraying theirs, they are going to start sitting in this water and it is going to
act like a deep water culture system.
So in order to prevent the roots from getting rots in that area, we are going to
still go with the same technique that we used in my previous model of the deepwater
culture and that is using one of these air stones inside there to make sure that we
keep enough oxygen.
So I am just going to be using one of these 12 inch air stones and that will go
right down inside of the system and what I have done is just simply drill the whole
at the top so that we can feed the air tube inside, all right and basically the
other thing I have done is made sure that all my cables are sort of in the same
corner so if I want to push that off to the side then I know that everything
is kind of coming out of the same spot.
But that being said let's go ahead and see this baby work.
Now for the moment of truth...
you got it spray everywhere without the lid on as you can see we have a working system.