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Aquaponic Hydroponic Vertical Grow Tower 1.3-Re-purposed Material
So I thought I would talk to you just a little bit about what’s going on with the vertical
grow tower. And, you know, because some of the things that I am running up against, that
I am having second thoughts about, and some changes that I am going to make to it before
I plant anything in it. First of all, we all know that when sunlight
hits the water reservoirs and in the case of having clear bottles or translucent bottles,
you’re going to have to cover them in some way, and what I was thinking about doing is
just getting some black paint and spray painting the outside of them. And that way it would
look nice, and also it would be functional, and the sunlight wouldn’t get through, and
we wouldn’t have algae issues. So I think that’s what I am going to do. If you have
a better suggestion, please, you know, shoot me a comment below.
Second of all, these holes that we’re dealing with, they are just not big enough. After
looking at it and putting some expanded clay inside it for the grow media. I realized that
there’s no way that it’s going to work having that inch-and-an -ighth size hole,
or inch and a half, I am sorry, inch-and-a-half sized hole. So I used a pocket knife or a
utility knife or what have you, use a knife, and I made it more into the shape of a triangle
and I loaded it down quite a bit so that there’s a lot of extra space here now that you can
get in and you can work on the plants. So you can see how well the plants are doing.
You can also plant it through that hole now I believe. I will be able to plant it through
that hole rather than having to unstack the pile and plant them one at a time as I screw
them together. What I would like to be able to do is clean it all out, stack it all back
up, and then put the grow media in, put the plant in, and then put some more grow media
in on top of the roots, or the root ball, and then I think that that would be the best
way to plant this.
So that’s what I am shooting for. And I also thought, well, heck, if I am going to
all this trouble, I have a pump that’s large enough to be able to pump more water, why
am I just only doing two, two towers? Or two stacks of bottles. So I came up with another
way of what I think would be a good addition to this kind of a tower, and frankly, I think
I like it enough that I might even try this not on a tower, more, I don’t know, running
along the top of a fence line, or stacked on a fence line, if you will, in this manner,
and I think that it will really, really, really work good. So let me show that to you. I had
some two-inch PVC just laying around, and I thought, well, I am going to take that and
see if I can get a bottle to stick out of the top of it. So I found the right size hole
saw bit and drove holes along the top of it, and it ended up being an inch-and-an-eighth
in a two-inch PVC, schedule-40 PVC. I had most of these fittings laying around. The
extra wood was from dumpster diving at the, at a construction site.
So I took the inch and an eighth hole saw, drilled into it, and then I used the drill,
and I just wallered it around so it made it a little bit wider, but yet it’s still smaller
than an inch-and-a-quarter, and you can make the shape of the hole more of an oval shape
because of the curvature of the pipe. So you can make it fit really well, and then cleaned
it up with a pocket knife around the edges where all the plastic popped up, and now we
have a place where you can stick nine bottles, two-liter bottles, or one-liter, or whatever
size you want, but the bottles that have the regular screw-on lid like a Mountain Dew bottle,
you can put them standing up out of the two-inch pipe all the way around this tower. If I wanted
to, I could go on up and make another one of these.
So I don’t know. I am kind of excited about that. I think it’s another way to grow.
It’s something that I haven’t seen anybody else do that I know of. And you can take this
and instead of wrapping it around the tower, you could take a 10 or 20 foot stick of PVC
and put plants on it like this, and then all you’d have to do is plumb in some of your,
like use sprinkler hose or sprinkler plumbing hose like what I am using on the tower already,
but you would be able to put that along the whole length of that pipe with all of your
grow bottles. So that’s, I am kind of excited about that. I think that that’s a really
good way to expand some of your backyard and your, you know, your backyard gardening, especially
if you’re in a place where you’re in the city, or an urban setting and you’re running
tight on space. I think that would work really good.
One more modification that I also made was I, the bottom of these caps, I had one-eighth
inch holes drilled in here, and I expanded the five holes out that I had to a much larger
set of holes because you just don’t need them to be that small, and it was holding
up the water just a little bit. You can see how firm this is. There’s nothing. It’s
not going to blow it off. See that? Once they are locked in, they are good. Those you can
tell, I still need a couple of more bottles. But this is the way I envision it looking.
And the reason why I put a cap here on this end is because you might want to connect another
section of pipe, another tower, you know, something else to that, and continue to grow
the system. So we’ll just grow it out as large as I can for the reservoir size that
I have, and then when I get large enough to expand the reservoir, and/or connected to
a fish tank, which is what I’d really like to do, then we’ll go that route.
Just taking these one-gallon per hour drip waters and putting them on the inside so that
they can automatically regulate the amount of water that goes through each one of these
individual pipes. Here’s where all the pipes are coming in. I need to add three more for
this side over here, but this is our vista, have them back together to keep them neat
and in order. And then I still need to get some parts, but this is the manifold that
I am making. The pump will run in here. We’ll be able to turn this on and off, and there’s
going to be a splitter here and here, and then another T with a splitter as well, and
that will give me three extra nipples to use for another, use for three more bottles somewhere.
I am not sure how I will make that happen, but there will be plenty. This will set down
inside the water tank. The distribution line here is going to come in this hole and also
connect to the pump, and we should have a system that would work very well. This is,
again, the drain pipe that runs back in from the horizontal system. And I left it like
this so that I could just slip it in, and I don’t think there’s going to be a leak
with water running through there. I am going to run a test run of this whole
system once I get the rest of the bottles in place, and after I get everything running
and I can see it’s working properly, then what I will do is pull them off and either
paint them black or wrap them with plastic or something to keep the mold and mildew from
growing on the inside of them and ruining our plants. So once I get that done, it will
be ready to roll. So as always, thank you for being here with me on my channel, and
please give us a thumbs up. I am sorry I have to ask you, but so many times I forget personally,
and I like to be reminded. So please give me a thumbs up, and share this video if you
think it would be helpful to somebody else, and it might shorten their learning curve
when it comes to aquaponics and hydroponics and gardening and being more self-sufficient
in their backyard. Thank you all for watching.