Automatic irrigation on soil - need some help matching pumps and what about gardena microdrip

I am on this journey for the last 2 months to build an automated system. My capacitive soil moisture sensors run pretty accurate and I would love to build some system that waters my soil. I don't want to use hydroponics.

Gardena remnants and irrigation techniquesIn the past I bought some gardena microdrip stuff which is from the 4.6mm hose variety. I saw those overpriced pump for vacation and it delivers around 1 bar apparently at around 23W. People say a lot that these pumps are not that great since they burn out. I have a lot of this tubing left, droppers, t pieces and micro mist nozzles(which for sure need too much pressure to do anything worthwhile). The upside here is that those little drippers have relatively big holes, so they don't need that much pressure to work, they can be individually fine tuned and adapted if I decide to water a small second flower pot. The downside here is that these need a bit of pressure and they can clog especially from organic nutrients.My other option would be to print an irrigation ring. It would require even less pressure but its not really that adaptable and my aforementioned sensor needs a bit of time until the moisture spreads more evenly.

Pump requirementsI would have loved to use a gravity fed system with solenoid valves but the space is very limited in that regard. So I have to use a pump that should pump out of a 20l barrel filled with water and nutes around 50cm into the air through a hall sensor for flow measurement and second line of defense and then into a 60 cm away gardening pot.

TankMy option 1 is to use a hdpe wide mouth tank. Idk how much danger there is for algae and other stuff but I would take one of those blue ones and the room is pretty dark outside anyway. Since I empty the whole tank roughly every 10 days, I read that going septic is very unlikely so no bubblers are needed.Option 2 would be a 15l tank above the tent, but I guess the hall effect flow sensor would take up too much pressure. The tank will have two small float switch sensors so that the pump doesn't run dry, even if it should be self priming. Also I need to think of an air intake to alleviate the pressure.

I guess another very low tech solution is to use blumats drip. It has less points of failure, but also doesn't have that many cool optimization features.

Submitted August 01, 2022 at 01:06AM by bacespucketee https://ift.tt/VHwU6AR