[HN Gopher] Automated Hydroponic System Build (2020)
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Automated Hydroponic System Build (2020)
Author : NegatioN
Score : 387 points
Date : 2021-07-11 01:43 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kylegabriel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kylegabriel.com)
| madaxe_again wrote:
| This is very impressive. I'm in the midst of implementing an
| outdoor hydroponics system in much the same vein, except I'm
| mostly rolling my own sensors using arduino and LoRa for comms,
| as we are really distributed here - the pi running openhab which
| runs the show (not just the hydroponics, but energy production
| and routing, tank levels and pumps, river level monitoring,
| weather station and generic drip irrigation) is hundreds of
| meters away from the garden. Finding sensors that weren't
| expensive or didn't require hardwiring was a pita, so just went
| for very generic modules. Ultrasonics for tank levels and river
| levels are my favourite so far - something really neat about
| being able to measure depth without contact, and the modules cost
| me EUR6 or something crazy. Commercial gear was all the better
| part of EUR1,000 for the same function. It's all a load of work,
| but it's a lot less than managing the homestead by hand.
|
| As I'm still in the midst of implementing - I have the physical
| end largely done, sensors mostly made, logic roughed out - I'm
| definitely going to be working through his article looking for
| gotchas.
|
| I've gotta say, I am curious as to what drove him to build his
| own platform to run it - openhab works great for home automation
| stuff, even complicated home automation stuff -- and
| grafana+influxdb give great insights.
|
| I digress, but I'm literally trusting it with my life these days,
| as I've built a flood EWS around it - we live on a river that,
| once in a blue moon, goes crazy - but predictably so - so a
| simple model around the delta and double delta of level change
| and precipitation rates (both from our weather station and the
| one other weather station in the drainage basin with public data,
| as well as weather forecasts) tells me when it's time to bug out,
| and when it's time to just enjoy the sound of the rain on the
| roof and the rumble of the river. It proved itself gratifyingly
| accurate this winter. The river started to look scary, the
| weather was dreadful, and I was giving only a 5% chance of a
| flood entering the house - less than 1% of it being a dangerous
| flood. Evacuated anyway, as I didn't trust it at that point, but
| we didn't flood, and the peak level was within 5cm of forecast.
| Really short drainage basin makes the river dynamic but very easy
| to predict.
|
| So yeah. Openhab. Super powerful for this kind of thing.
| theCodeStig wrote:
| Unfortunately these DIY systems are usually made with PVC. I
| think it's worthwhile, to purchase a ready made system that uses
| food grade plastic, as I have done.
| papercrane wrote:
| PVC is a food safe plastic. There are some PVC products treated
| with things that make them not food safe, but as long as it has
| a NSF-51 marking it's food grade.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| I'd expect the concern is about plasticizers leaching from
| the PVC. They're not "toxic" but they are possibly endocrine
| disruptors.
| sefoc wrote:
| Really cool idea, I was looking into this for creating a business
| nkingsy wrote:
| Hydro doesn't taste as good as organic, and it needs to be
| flushed or you ingest a lot of nitrates, which is likely
| carcinogenic. Flushing requires careful planning and a system
| designed for it. You can't just treat it like a fridge full of
| food. With soil you can just leave stuff in the ground until you
| want to eat it.
|
| I've poured a lot of time and money into the hobby, and have
| settled on organic soil with some simple drip for indoor growing.
|
| The water use is about the same. As long as you're indoor the
| water has nowhere to runoff/evaporate to.
|
| IMO the benefits of hydro/Aquaponics are nonexistent. Also, the
| whole system is a pile of plastics. The tote and drain pipe in
| the linked article are not food grade plastic, which would scare
| me away from this system.
|
| The automation is way way way overkill. Hydro is very easy to
| tweak. The nutrient profile is a tiny percentage of the labor,
| and a $3 battery operated temp/humidity display is plenty for
| keeping things nice for the plants. They show the high and low
| since last reset, which is all you need.
|
| If I had any outdoor space with good sun I would set up a
| greenhouse, but since I don't have that I run leds directly off
| of solar panels on my roof (dc-dc step ups and downs as needed).
|
| Kind of cool to see them rise and set with the sun.
| millzlane wrote:
| Honestly, there is research out there that is a couple of years
| old that disproves the need for flushing. This is the first
| link I found. And the first of it's study that I know of.
| https://www.rxgreentechnologies.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/...
|
| I'll see if I can locate the talk from Dr. Bruce Bugbee on
| flushing.
| nkingsy wrote:
| I've found that herbs like cilantro taste extra strong when
| unflushed (even I taste the soapy thing, which I don't
| normally)
|
| I take my cues from the cannabis hobbyists, and they've
| largely moved away from hydro because of the taste. Unflushed
| bud is known to be harsh, give a nasty headache, and leave
| extra salts in the ash for those who smoke it.
| Teever wrote:
| Regardless of growing in hydroponics or in soil cannabis
| growers still recommend flushing.
| circleit wrote:
| This is obviously nothing less than astounding. I can't start to
| describe how incredibly knowledgeable and skilled this person is.
|
| Because the topic of hydro and growing food and all that is on HN
| here, I wanted to leave the following comment on a higher level.
|
| Ten years ago I was super dedicated to problems surrounding
| water, which of course include food and all the issues we have
| with our food systems. At the pinnacle, I was working with a half
| acre aquaponics greenhouse in Watsonville, CA. We had 8000
| striped bass and produced and incredible amount of fresh produce.
| It was pesticide free because of you put chemicals on the plants
| it would get into the water and hurt the fish.
|
| It was more "natural" than hydroponics. You weren't using
| fertilizer imported from all over, everything in the system could
| be produced on-site. The more biologically diverse the system
| was, the more resilient and productive.
|
| Both hydro and aqua phonics - the latter of which has been
| practiced for thousands of years, definitely save a ton of water.
| But I think aquaponics has a massive chance of being mainstream,
| especially as automation and all the advanced tech and robots get
| better.
|
| It's about ecological engineering on a local scale - you are
| maxing out the ecology to human and nature's benefit, and there
| are so many relationships to learn and exploit.
|
| It's strange how impactful this could be on a grand scale - see
| some Dan barber Ted talks [1]
|
| Just really need to get some investment on this on a big scale,
| like the hydro houses in Canada. No one has, from all that I
| know, really built aquaponic systems on a grand scale that are
| economically viable. But I see it coming and after I wrap up my
| current company, I'm jumping right back in to working on this.
|
| We are just going to be doing what nature did best before we
| murdered all of it...but maybe Mac it out super hard and super
| quick compared to what it could do.
|
| Lastly, with all the climate stuff: Don't forget, you can't put a
| price on the systems that produce the food, water and clean air
| we breath, cuz you know, we'd be dead. Well maybe we can, but we
| sure aren't trying.
|
| [1]
| https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with...
| phrotoma wrote:
| I live in Canada but haven't heard of the hydro houses you
| mentioned ("hydro" here is confusingly a synonym for
| electricity so google isn't helping either), can you provide
| specifics?
| mediaman wrote:
| Canada has enormous hydroponic vegetable growing operations.
| They're quite impressive. I don't know really why they have
| built so much more than the US, but my theory is that there
| may be regulatory issues with importing fresh food from the
| Salinas valley, where much of the American vegetable crop is
| grown, and hydro is the best way to grow in the Canadian
| climate.
|
| One company you can check out is Windset Farms.
| wussboy wrote:
| Have you seen the weather up here?!? For most of this
| country, growing things indoors in completely artificial
| environments is the only option. There may be regulatory
| issues at play, but mainly I would think it's a climatic
| necessity.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Indoors is more about solar insolation than climate.
| Southern Ontario is same latitude as northernmost
| california.
|
| Check out Leamington Ontario and there are some big
| greenhouses.
|
| But there's a part of Spain where the whole city is a
| greenhouse: check out el ejido.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I saw a segment 15 years ago about "biodynamic" hydroponics.
| Not sure if that's a real term or whether I'm even remembering
| it right, but as I recall the concept was that your grow is
| more or less a completely closed system that involved fish
| circulating nutrients through the system. As you say, you don't
| add nutrients from far off places. The fish feed the plants and
| the plants feed the fish. In that segment, the fish were
| tilapia. It seemed perfect and has captured my imagination this
| whole time.
| matbatt38 wrote:
| Just for the reference, "Biodynamic" refers to Rudolf
| Steiner's method for growing food. It's a quite common ritual
| in Europe, mostly for wine but also for other type of plants.
| It j's related to Anthroposophy, an new-age/esoteric movement
| from the 1930s' which somehow lived and grow until now and is
| still quite active. IMHO they're a bit frightening as they
| are now quite powerful (they have a bank (La Nef) many
| schools in western Europe and their own pharmatical lab
| (Weleda), all of them making a LOT of money) and clearly have
| highly conservative political views (one of their leader ran
| for president in France a while ago with an homophobe and
| racist project). Most documentation is in French or Deutch so
| if you wanna dig it's probably gonna take some translation.
| https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/07/MALET/58830
| https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/07/MALET/58797
| gspr wrote:
| They really are a scary bunch. Moreover, it's terribly
| annoying how most people in Europe seem to have labelled
| them as harmless. They're very much considered "ah, those
| weirdos, I don't agree with them but surely we should just
| let them do their thing". It's frightening - the Steiner
| guys are dangerous.
| EllipticCurve wrote:
| What do you mean by dangerous exactly? I was briefly
| involved with some people from the Steiner philosophy
| (the school) and while some people could definitely be
| labeled as a weird bunch with esoteric tendencies, none
| of them seemed dangerous at all.
|
| Everything seemed very open and accepting to people
| different than themself. In a positive way, not in a
| "join my cult" way.
| matbatt38 wrote:
| They form most of the anti-vax movement in Europe (there
| are documented case of a presumed-extinct disease killing
| children in Steiner schools) and are also deeply sexist
| and homophobic due to their beliefs in a mystical balance
| between "Man" and "Women". They also actively infiltrate
| medical institutions in France, Germany and Switzerland
| to favor meds from their official medicine (and private
| labs), and some country allow them to be officially sold
| as medicine with reduced controls in regard to efficacy.
| Oh and they successfully lobbied the French state into
| shutting down it's own observatory of derives in cults,
| known for having rose many alerts against Steiner schools
| to the govt over the years.
| EllipticCurve wrote:
| Thanks for the information. It does seem like the anti-
| vax movement is a lot larger within the Waldorf-community
| than outside. I never really thought about that.
| gspr wrote:
| They spread bullshit in a seemingly innocuous way. That's
| dangerous stuff that undermines society.
| weaksauce wrote:
| i saw a youtube video on that kind of system within the last
| few years so yeah it's definitely something. you just need to
| make sure the fish are happy
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| > It was pesticide free because of you put chemicals on the
| plants it would get into the water and hurt the fish.
|
| Funny how on a smaller human scale ("our bass will die and our
| food production will be in danger"), the problem and solution
| seem obvious. Once you scale it up to world terms, where you're
| only lightly polluting a very large amount of animals, humans
| no longer instinctively comprehend it. Much like empathy and
| compassion only hold a group together up to a certain size.
| mastazi wrote:
| I have been in the aquarium hobby in the past, so when I started
| looking into hydroponics, for me the natural outcome was to also
| look into aquaponics[1].
|
| What I like the most about aquaponics (and recirculating
| hydroponics) is the sustainability aspects, it is an almost
| completely closed-loop system, with relatively small external
| inputs compared to other farming methods, and extremely small
| water requirements (due to the fact that water is continuously
| recycled).
|
| Two bits of info about aquaponics that not many people know:
|
| 1. it is possible to have aquaponics systems in a vegetarian
| context: in many cases the fish is not for human consumption as
| food (in large commercial systems this is usually koi that is
| sold as ornamental fish[2a], in smaller systems goldfish kept as
| pets[2b]).
|
| 2. there are aquaponics systems that don't require access to
| electricity, in particular the iAVS system (a.k.a "sandponics")
| was developed with subsistence farmers that had no electricity
| access in mind, it doesn't require water to be pumped
| continuously, rather you are only required to manually
| recirculate the water a few times a day which can be achieved
| with a bucket or other low tech solutions[3].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics
|
| [2a] https://www.pvrkoicentre.com/pages/aquaponics
|
| [2b] https://farmingaquaponics.com/caring-for-goldfish-in-
| aquapon...
|
| [3] https://garydonaldson.net/home/iavs/
| lemmox wrote:
| I set-up an aquaponic system on my front porch a few years ago.
| My wife was skeptical but I grew some of the finest basil
| around. Just used a tote filled with goldfish, some PVC piping,
| and a pump. Unfortunately one evening the raccoons figured out
| how to pop the lid off the tote - it was a massacre!
| kmc059000 wrote:
| I had a small one in my backyard for a few years. My goldfish
| would ofen simply disappear. One day they were there, the
| next day they weren't. They also died often and there were a
| few causes.
|
| * a good number jumped out as the water level was close to
| the top of the tank when the water was cycled. Of these, some
| were found me and others by something else. * birds found and
| ate them. I was completely okay with this. I never actually
| confirmed this but it seemed the only plausible reason *
| illness. The goldfish I bought were feeder fish meant for
| turtles and were never meant to survive long. Disease was a
| big component. I would replenish often, but on two occasions
| within a week or two, all would be dead, old and new. *
| temperature. We had a deeper freeze than typical for my area
| in the 20s F. It froze in the pipes and much of the tank. And
| in the summer we had over 100F
|
| I would have cared more were they fish for consumption. When
| you can buy goldfish for 10 cents a piece it was too easy to
| simply replenish than to fix the problems. A more humane, and
| likely cheaper solution would have been to put a small amount
| of ammonium chloride in the water regularly. I had a giant
| bag from setting up the system.
|
| I got a ton of lettuce and tomatoes from the system though
| and learned a ton.
| mastazi wrote:
| Oh no! I had goldfish as pets I can imagine that must have
| been sad. At least they died for "natural" causes.
| lemmox wrote:
| It was! They were my urban farming buds. I took care of the
| PVC, they took care of the pooping, the basil took care of
| clearing the nitrites out of the water. It was all golden
| until that masked bandit struck. Now I live out of town -
| I'm quite sure the bears would eat the whole kit if I set
| it up again.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| If you want inspiration to build a bit larger aquaponics
| system, then maybe our build can help. We have a system with
| place for about 7000 plants, with two fish tanks of 4.5 m3
| each. We have about 200 rainbow trout. Total system water
| volume is 38 m3.
|
| We are also running a prototype setup where we take roots and
| plants not sold and feeding them to mealworms, which will
| become food supplement for the fish. This way we won't need to
| feed them as much conventional fish feed.
|
| This is a pilot and demo facility, and we have spent about 15
| 000 hours building it and learning, and material cost has been
| about EUR200k.
|
| http://cirkularodling.se/build-an-aquaponic-indoor-farm-part...
| circleit wrote:
| Visited your website but I don't speak that language so I
| couldn't understand it, but looks like you use a method
| similar Nelson and Pade...? One thing we did to increase rev
| per area of space was inoculate wood with mycelium and hang
| it above the water. You could harvest market desirable
| mushrooms along with your produce and protein. Also,
| incorporating shrimp to further add to the process of
| breaking down the ammonia particulates during the
| transformation to nitrate can be beneficial and another rev
| stream. Are y'all profitable and scalable with the ops you're
| running?
|
| I'm kind of bummed because I was hoping there were going to
| be a lot more people focused on this and scaling it, but in
| this thread there are not...
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| The build log I linked to is in English. We will also
| publish more in that if you want to follow it.
|
| This is a pilot facility, but looks similar to what Nelson
| and Pade offers at a quick glance. The commercial scale
| facility will be very different than this. The scale is
| 50-100 times larger and you can think of the growing area
| of this as one layer in a multi-layer facility.
|
| This small scale pilot is far from profitable. Generally we
| think you need to be at up to 1000 m2 growing area if you
| have a facility which is a side business and you take care
| of it alongside your farm. If it is a business by itself
| with external distribution you probably need it to be about
| 10 000 m2. (Of course this depends heavily on your local
| conditions, what you can sell, at what price etc.)
|
| We are focused on scaling, but that is another story than a
| demo and pilot plant. :)
| mastazi wrote:
| Well done! IMHO producing the feed on site is the ultimate
| sustainability move because it makes aquaponics truly
| autonomous. In the past I tried soldier fly larvae but I
| wasn't able to produce enough to sustain my fish, it was just
| a supplement for them.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Excellent! Both your website and the original post. I think
| farming in Scandinavia needs a reboot, specially because of
| unfavour Clima. At the moment it relies heavily on buying
| food from other countries with better clima and cheaper
| labour. Unortunately this involves a lot of
| transportation/contamination. This kind of project seems to
| point the right direction. For more <<normal>> people I
| believe is important to try growing things outside when
| possible or inside. Then you really understand the real value
| of what we take for granted on the grocery store.
| elihu wrote:
| Hmm... I built a pond last summer as a pandemic project, and
| just got koi in it a couple months ago. I haven't really
| thought seriously about aquaponics, but I seem to have most of
| what I would need right there already if I wanted to start
| growing something. (Maybe lettuce?)
|
| Right now, the pond has a lot of regular pond plants, including
| azolla (aka mosquito fern or fairy moss) which about every week
| or two I cull about a bucket's worth and feed to the
| roommates's chickens so it doesn't take over the whole surface.
| tells wrote:
| I've been mentally planning all of this in my head for when I
| move to a place with enough space. The amount of detail and
| research provided in one page is nothing short of astounding. I
| know I would have never done anything close to this level of work
| had I done it myself. This level is something else entirely.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| Nice work! I tried hydroponics a couple of times, though with a
| simpler setup. I usually had to combat the build up of algae in
| the reservoir tank. I was farming outdoors so I blamed sunlight
| and nutrients for creating conditions for algae growth.
|
| I wonder if the use Mycostop would be effective against algae?
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| We get algae buildup in our systems if we have exposed water,
| especially in slow moving water. Any loose algae gets taken
| away in the Drumfilter.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I suspect it's sunlight as well. I did hydroponics this year
| and last year and never had an issue with algae. I kept
| everything in totes.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| I was watching this and wondering if a simplified version of this
| could be used for mushrooms. Then I saw the very first comment to
| his YouTube video linking an unlisted video showing a timelapse
| of oyster mushrooms fruiting. Nice!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVYh4hm-wJ4
| jmheflin wrote:
| Awesome build and write up. I used to work for a company called
| AEssense making automated aeroponic systems for commercial
| cannabis growers. They are still around and have installs all
| over the US. Many similar features to your NFT system. Cool
| stuff!
| libertine wrote:
| This is great, and this also means that it's possible to
| artificially create an environment of scarcity to the plants,
| which apparently is great for our longevity, like David Sinclair
| pointed out [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmRzeD4_41M&t=314s
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Having built simple pneumatic and hydraulic systems using relays,
| sensors and SoCs, this would he an excellent and fun project. It
| is actually one of my ultimate goals in life to automate a closed
| system of food production.
|
| But one thing, externalizing a lot of the automation to already
| automated processes i.e. the natural environment is quite useful.
| You have a general pattern of predictability and the trade off is
| that it is not granularly predictable but there are less
| catastrophic failure modes. All in all, if you're on earth it
| makes the most sense to just grow things outside, or in a passive
| greenhouse if temperature is a concern. Also to be considered is
| the more active automation complexity you add, the more narrow
| the scope will be, so if you're tightly controlling nutrients for
| example, you're restricted on what variety you can have. If you
| consider the plants active participants in the system as opposed
| to subjects to or of the system you can devise a much easier
| system to construct, a la permaculture.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| What you want is a growth chamber.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Same dream here. I just never have time or space ;)
|
| I make due with with the garden in the meantime. As you say a
| lot of it is just free in nature. Nutrients are in the compost
| (I have a lot of trees meaning leaves that I compost with grass
| clippings, kitchen scraps and guinea pig poop) and sun and
| water are free and automatic most of the times.
|
| The problem comes in when these don't cooperate. A few years
| ago my corn was unusable. Too wet and I'm not sure what exactly
| it was but it had this black fungus-y stuff. Threw it all out.
| Then it was too dry so I had to add an automated watering
| system as the rain barrels couldn't keep up. This year I
| haven't had to use it yet. I can't even really use the
| overflowing rainbarrels because it keeps raining once a week
| (mainly have potatoes this year).
|
| What I really like is fruit trees. Very very hands off after
| getting them established. Unfortunately they are mainly for
| fresh eating and jam, so not really food production in that
| sense. But sure as hell very tasty all year round! I can
| recommend sour cherries. The sour of the cherries is awesome
| once made into jam and personally I will eat them right off the
| tree too. Not many worms either.
| reydequeso wrote:
| that black fungus, corn smut, is highly appreciated in Latin
| American communities.
|
| I've been tooling around the idea of making a corn smut farm,
| because once you get it it 'll stay (in most instances) but
| that would also make growing corn difficult if I wanted to
| grow it in the future.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Interesting. I had no idea! That is very good to know
| actually in case it ever happens again in a year I do have
| corn.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| There is a place in San Diego that puts it on tacos.
| They're really good.
|
| http://www.aquiestexcoco.com/what-is-huitlacoche/
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > corn smut is highly appreciated in Latin American
| communities.
|
| So are the guinea pigs! But further south and higher
| elevation than taco consumers.
| ornornor wrote:
| > guinea pig poop
|
| Interested in this statement, because I've always read and
| been told not to put pet waste into the compost; the
| rationale being that they can carry viruses that you can then
| catch if you eat what grew in it. Is guinea pig poop special,
| or do you have a particular method to avoid that?
| tharkun__ wrote:
| That entirely depends on the animal. You don't want dog,
| cat or human.
|
| Chickens have been used for ages to make really awesome
| manure. It's so 'hot' you need a lot of other material +
| time so it doesn't burn plants. I guess they might not
| count as pets in most places, but around here lots of
| backyard chickens.
|
| Do horses count as pets? Horse manure is awesome too. It's
| only lightly processed grass/hay and you can still see
| individual blades. I started off my veggie garden with a
| load of 1 year old horse manure from a local horse place.
|
| My guinea pigs mow the lawn in summer (and still get some
| kitchen scraps like cucumber cut-offs the kids don't like)
| and the radish greens whenever we pull a radish etc. In
| winter I still don't feed them any meat :)
| These small rodents, along with other common household pets
| such as gerbils and hamsters, are omnivores, eating both
| plants and animal proteins (mainly from insects). That
| being said, those kept as pets are typically fed a plant-
| based diet with much of their proteins and minerals
| obtained from specialized food, often in the form of
| pellets. So, unlike meat-eating animals (including your cat
| or dog), their manure is perfectly safe for use in the
| garden and suitable for home composting too.
|
| https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/composting/manures/guinea-
| p...
| ornornor wrote:
| That makes sense, thanks for the explanation.
| s0rce wrote:
| Have you thought about using weak acid cation ion exchange resins
| to control pH?
| jbuhbjlnjbn wrote:
| As a side note, the way the plants and electronics are interwoven
| is summoning strange emotions for me, an Akira'esqe picture...
| There are two main ways these days to do natural farming, one is
| back to the roots, the other one is this high-tech, putting all
| advancements we got into it. Straight out of a sci-fi movie if
| you ask me.
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(page generated 2021-07-11 23:01 UTC)