Thanks! I am all about doing as little manual labor as possible. This is in my basement. See the valving picture below. There is a sump pump right underneath the upward facing "vent" pipe. When I need to dump the water, I shut the valve going to the plants, rotate that vent pipe down, open the valve to that pipe over the sump and turn on the pump and let it drain the reservoir.WiseOne wrote: ↑Wed Oct 28, 2020 10:41 am Wow, fancy!!! and, looks fantastic, Cortopassi. You are hereby nominated as the hydroponics master. Sorry, I thought the growing medium was soil.
Changing out the 13 gallon tank....how do you do it? It looks like this is outdoors, so I guess you just dump out the water? I have to carry containers into my bathroom to dump it down the toilet or bathtub. That got old really fast. Also, I found that growing in soil (with a drip watering system run on a timer) made the plants more bug resilient.
I am plagued with fungus gnats, thrips, spider mites and probably a ton of other pests. They must live in the 100 year old walls, and they come in through the leaky windows too from the courtyard outside. I don't even bother trying to grow anything in summer, can really only do it in the winter after the first good hard freeze as the pest populations are less.
I also have a small sink to the right which is not in the picture. I have another set of pipes that has an open end that I can rotate right under the faucet, and the other end in the reservoir, which is how I fill.
Gnats...grrrrr.... I have them, but about 1.5 months ago after reading, I have one of these floating in my reservoir (https://www.amazon.com/Mosquito-Dunks-1 ... B0002ASQ4A). It seems to be doing the job, and is a natural bacteria. I've only seen <10 gnats in the past 3-4 days, the numbers have been dropping. Could be the weather too.
