I’ve had the same system running for about a month now, and it works great. If you’re not short on space I’d probably do the horizontal versions using PVC pipes (for more even sunlight across everything) but I’ve got my tower sitting in the corner of our sunroom and is happily growing most our herbs.

Hoocho is a great source of information in general too.

While I appreciate the hacking potential here .. I fail to see the point beyond it. You won't save any money over buying the salad at an expensive organic store. You won't help the environment (all the plastic and heating and electricity for artificial lighting won't ever be compensated by you saving on pesticides). You won't scale this up to become self-sufficient.

Just get a garden and put the plants in soil. Sure, they may not be as "perfect". But you can have more of them to compensate. Sunlight and rain will do most of the work, use some home-made compost for nutrition, done.

So, what's all the fuzz? Feels like hydroponics, especially with all those 3D-printing gadgetry, is bringing you further away from nature, not closer.

"Just get a garden and put the plants in soil."

I don't have a yard.

Hydroponics can be set up in my apartment. Not to mention that it can work all year: Lighting is important, since I'm pretty far north in an attic apartment with bad lighting.

Theoretically, I might be able to rent a plot 1.2km away, but I would have to carry my tools and things and honestly, it makes it all that much more inconvenient.

I'll also mention that I do not have an expensive organic store around, though most stores sell a bit of it. All of my produce is expensive anyway: I*m in Norway and a lot is shipped in. Varieties grown at home aren't attractive because of these things, though. You get different tastes growing at home. Tomatoes, for example, are generally better.

Also: Folks use these methods to grow pot, and I completely understand not growing it where others can steal it... if you are even lucky enough to live where growing outside will not land you in jail.

On the topic of growing vs buying plants, well of course buying plants is going to be cheaper. There are economies of scale at the very least. You're probably not going to be growing your own plants because it's cheaper to do so.

On the topic of hydroponics; limited space is one factor. Hydroponics can be bent to fit your space in a way that soil based often can't. Once you start trying to make like vertical planters or something you're probably spending as much money on frames or shelves as you would on a hydroponics setup and you've still got to haul water to your shelf of planters and water them all individually.

For hydroponics I just have a bucket on the floor that I can fill with water, and it will automatically water the plants that are well above my head. There's just a lot less physical labor involved in filling up a bucked once a month than in trying to water a bunch of individual plants.

You've got to remember that for the most part these are happening indoors, in people's living spaces. If those same people had a large yard they might be using raised beds and irrigation. It also frankly take a lot less thinking, I don't have to worry about pest control or if the sun dried out the soil earlier than I expected so I need to water more, or pretty much anything related to climate.

Personally I have one of those 3D printed hydroponics towers, an automatically irrigated soil planter, and regular house plants that I have to water manually. Of the three the ones I have to water manually tend to have the most issues, issues with root rot or under-watering, issues with nutrient unavailability (I've gotten better at recognizing when they need some artificial fertilizer but it is a skill), etc.

The best is probably the automatically irrigated soil planter box.

Well the hacking I think is the biggest draw.

Other than that I'm looking into this cause I'm frequently away for 4-5-7 days with no one to water my plants and also live in a small apartment(in the EU) so don't really have a nearby garden as an option.

> bringing you further away from nature, not closer

Yep, I agree, however, I also feel soil is more perfect/magical than hydroponics and less fun if you want to hack around on a small scale.

I still prefer a garden but it's just not viable at the moment.

You can definitely grow certain things in hydroponics that are a LOT cheaper than buying in a store, just saying.

> While I appreciate the hacking potential here .. I fail to see the point beyond it.

That could be said for 90% of the stuff on this site though. It’s just a hobby, it’s fun to tinker and learn.

I’m definitely trying the horizontal, PVC-based setup when I have a more permanent place. I’m moving out of my current house by the end of the year so having something modular that I can disassemble and put inside of a bucket made sense to me

Does PVC leach anything into the water, especially when exposed to full sunlight/UV?

Apparently, there are several kinds of PVC and only some of them are properly food safe. See more here https://www.howtoaquaponic.com/designs/is-pvc-food-safe/

Thanks! That's quite the dire warning about PVC cement. Maybe I'll stick with silicone tubing for my first setup.