Build

Overview

Building a new hydroponics system can be daunting. Turns out, it is not bad at all, you really just have to jump in and start. Building can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Here, we have broken it down into multiple sections to help the reader compartmentalize the various pieces needed.

This site is a work-in-progress, so we will slowly be updating the site with more content as we have time to jot down our thoughts from our build.

Building is not hard, it is just tedious and you have to keep many different things in mind. It is like a typical engineering project, but at a much smaller scale. You have to envision what you want, then try to work backward from there. With us, we had a specific space and build in mind, so all of our decisions were based off of that.

How long it will take

This was a very fun build and a process we really enjoyed. Unlike other options like a Kratky hydroponics system, this build took about a month’s worth of nights and weekends to finish. About half of the time was dedicated to thinking through problems or try new things. We suspect that if we had to build this again, it would be much faster than before.

If we were to put a total number of hours on this, it would be around 20 - 30 hours worth of work. So if you have everything planned out properly, you may be able to cut that down by quite a bit. We spent a lot of time driving back and forth to the store to get the right parts, but if you had it all ready, then it will go much quicker.

As mentioned earlier, some of the time, it would take 20 - 30 minutes between one step and the next for us. It’s because we either ran into something we did not anticipate or made a mistake and then deciding the best way to fix it. It was hard to plan everything up front because we didn’t have any experience building, so it was part build and part tinkering. In fact, it’s not completely done because we are looking into potential automation/monitoring solutions. So…in reality, it may never actually finishes. It’s more of an ongoing evolution.

Mistakes

We made a lot of mistakes along the way, this greatly added to the time and cost of the build. As we go through and writing this all up, we will try to detail many of the issues we ran into so hopefully if you follow our steps, you won’t have to face the same problems.

For example, we read somewhere to spray pain the lid of the reservoir. Boy was that a mistake. Maybe we used the wrong type of spray paint. We bougt the Rust-Oleum Painter’s Touch 2X Ultra Cover Spray Paint - Flat White but that turned out to be a complete waste of time. We spray painted two layers, with the second coat being quite thick, light still made it through. We ended up temporarily covering it with cardboard box. The aftermath? Our system still smells like spray paint three weeks later. We still don’t know if it’s the type of spray paint we used or we did not apply the paint correctly, the effort was definitely not worth it. Save your time, go with some sort of a blackout covering like cardboard paper or even aluminum foil.

Unique solutions

Through all of the mistakes, we felt like we had a few breakthroughs that we were quite proud of. Of course, we will try to detail it all out here on this site. We understand that there are many tutorials out there and they are all great. We want to provide yet another perspective on how to build your own.

Build guide

Yeah yeah yeah, enough with the yammering, just link to the build dammit!

Considerations when building the frame - this section walks you through some of the things you may have to consider before building your your hydroponics garden. From knowing the temperature to deciding on your ideal grow site spacing, you will have to nail down some of these before you start your build.
Frame construction - this details out how we built our frame. Given our requirements, we went with the Neumayer wall and built the frame out of 2x4 lumber. We include background on why we opted for certain decisions and other insights on what we could have done better.
Grow site construction - the simple, but mostly tedious, part on which plumbing parts to buy and how to cut and assemble them. The sizes of the cuts and the spacing calculations.
Plumbing and fittings - as simple as it may sound, this part took the most time figuring out how to get all of the fittings work together into the configuration that we needed. Some of it seemed obvious when the construction was done, but at the time of building and due to our unfamiliarity with the overwhelming selection of options, this took way more time than we thought it would.
Finalizing the setup and misc - the final pieces to wrap everything up. Anything that was missed in one of the previous sections or seemed impertinent will be included here.

Skills required

Some of this work will require some skills with power tools like a table saw and a miter saw. This was not meant to be pretty, so all of the cuts are really simple cuts and straight forward. The precision does not have to be high like a woodworking project will need to be, so ìf you’re off the cut by a 1/4 inch or so, it is not too big of a deal.

The precision needs to be a little higher when you are dealing with the PVC pipes, but those cuts are made with a PVC cutter (highly recommended), so it’s not too difficult. Even still, the PVC cutters don’t really cut straight on the big pipes, so there’ll be some imprecision built in. Some of the cuts are small, so using a miter saw may be dangerous for these smaller cuts so we don’t recommend that.