Automated watering setup?

[farley101]

Thanks WW, I'm gonna head to the home improvement place tomorrow and see what I can find to get something together.

I'd be able to water in place if I had something like what you've got set up. That would be very nice to be able to do!

[SouthPark]

Farley... make sure all the connections and connectors are solid/robust. When all pressurised... some hose connections can burst or bust apart. It's ok when we're at home to catch it. Just don't want nasty surprises when away from home. Also, sometimes need to watch out for timers that glitch for some crazy reason.

[Fairorchids]

I use the same set-up as described by Ray. Home Depot has (unless old out), both single hose & two hose battery powered controls.

I have two areas outdoors, both in full sun:

Hose 1 waters the Cymbdium benches, 2.1/2 hours every 3 days.

Hose 2 waters the Vanda rack, 20 minutes every 6 hours.

[DirtyCoconuts]

For what it is worth. i have stopped using pin timers for anything except full outdoor applications (not near the house at all, like in the bushes) and i am using smart wifi plugs now...it takes a moment to assign it a name and function and then i can access the whole power strip and adjust as i like.

for my fish tank i have three, FT (F.ish T.ank, super clever, i know) light, FT filter, and FT air pump. I set them as i want them on in the app and then i can treat it like a normal timer with the bonus of alerts if something goes wrong.

[SouthPark]

For another system, I do have a solenoid valve with input and output connectors for home watering, that just so-happened to require 24V AC. So I had to get an adapter with consumer mains AC to 24V AC adapter ----- which was not a problem.

So I just ran that solenoid with a timer (with battery back-up so that it doesn't lose its memory and settings if there happen to be black-outs or brown-outs) in the neighbourhood.

I just connected the valve connectors to a garden tap - using very good quality connectors, and very carefully-fitted (and checked) joins (between hoses and connectors).

So the system turned out to simply be a regular micro-jet system. This wasn't for orchids though. It was just for regular pot plants. Micro-jets were just placed in some pots - which would spray (cover) a few pots in the vicinity.

Naturally, I needed to get those smaller tubes to tap into the main line where-ever I needed it.

With orchids ------ given that we know some of them can develop root problems if the media gets too wet or water-logged etc ------ we might have to do something to compensate. So, instead of micro-jets, could put in drip tubes down the sides of the orchid pots ...... so that the media toward the sides of the pot can stay wet ------ and just keep the humidity and moisture in the pot at satisfactory levels.

All this definitely takes time and effort to set up for sure though. Getting the water to regions where we want it will take take, effort, and enough equipment (tubes, tapping points, nozzles, stakes, etc).

I forgot to mention ----- I had to run low voltage (24V AC) wire out to the solenoid at the garden tap ---- which was at least 10 metres of it hahaha. At least it wasn't consumer electrical AC mains voltage heheheh.

Anyway, the hardware-store timer (with battery back-up to prevent settings memory loss) was just set to water the plants for say X minutes at whatever list of times I wanted. And this timer was just powered from the home electrical power socket. The timer system would then energise the adapter that provides 24V AC to the solenoid for watering the plants.

Worked nicely and reliably - as a regular micro-jet watering system should.

One downside is that large quantities of tubing material have to be stored somewhere when we get home from holidays hahaha. And it's not easy to coil lots and lots of tubes and store it.