This week we describe our DIY aeroponics tower for our Aeroponics at Sea…20205! Our design is based on a core a core product from Agrowponics.com. It incorporates components we already had on hand, like a pump and power supply, plus, cheap plumbing supplies and items from our local hardware store.
Although we are loving our commercial system Tower Garden, we need an alternative, something smaller and mobile once we transition to boat life. Plus, since we don’t actually own our own boat, this allows us to test out our ideas and tinker a little. Some might call it experimentation 😉
The key ideas in the design focus on:
- keeping the weight of the nutrient reservoir low on the deck
- providing flexibility between the reservoir and the plant tower to allow for some movement to accommodate rolling in a boat environment
We aren’t sure it will do as well as the commercial Tower Garden; but, this experiment allows us time to work out the kinks. And, we can see if we can get it to produce veggies to its full potential. Now, our experiments are NOT able to consider living in such a salt water dense environment, but we’ll need something to tinker with once we’re on the boat. Plus, there are others out there living the aeroponic plant-based boat life right now that we are keeping up with.
Anther considerations that we haven’t fully fleshed out yet is the power requirements. The water pump and grow lights have a not-insignificant power draw in an off-the-grid setting. We’ll be trying to figure out if there are more tweaks that need to be made to make the system sustainable, but again, that is more difficult while not actually living on a boat. Needless to say, research will continue.
We hope you find our DIY aeroponics info helpful. If you have any advice, thoughts or comments, we’d love to hear with a comment!
Until next week, thanks for watching.
Happy Living,
Steffan (& Kelly)