Cheap D.I.Y Hempy Bucket/Soil Automatic Watering System

rimfire

rimfire

Active Member
I use Hempy Buckets in a SCROG for my girls. According to Hempy you need to hand water your plants 1 time a day until they are established and then every other day after that. While I love tending to my small garden, I'm away from it for more than 2 days at a time and needed to come up with an automatic watering system to keep them happy and healthy. So here is what I came up with.........

A small submersible pump. You don't need one that has a large Gallons Per Hour (GPH) rating. The one I use pumps 145 GPH and is used for a pump in small fountains. It also has a flow adjustment on it and suction feet to hold it in place. I found it on E-bay for $8.00. Works like a champ
 

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rimfire

rimfire

Active Member
A bucket of your choice. If you are automatic watering lots of large plants for an extended period of time you will need a large bucket or tub. In my case I have 2 plants in 2 gallon Hempy Buckets and I get by with an old 4 gallon paint bucket for my nute rez. I can water every other day and go over a week without having to hand water. If I needed to be away longer I will just increase the size of my rez and add more nutes.
 

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rimfire

rimfire

Active Member
1/4" tubing, connectors and bubbler heads. For these items I went to the auto sprinkler section at Home Depot. I have approximately $5.00 in parts. I have about 4 feet of hose connected to the pump on one end, a tee connector, 2 short pieces of hose and 2 heads with built-in stakes to hold them in place. Very simple.
 

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rimfire

rimfire

Active Member
The timer. This is the most important and expensive part of the system. It will be necessary for each different garden to establish how long the pump needs to run to water the plants. I my case with my 2 gallon Hempy Buckets I have to let the pump run for 4 minutes every other day in order to keep them happy. The only way to be able to do this is with a DIGITAL timer. You can program it to water everyday multiple times, every other day or only on weekends. You can also program it to run for only a minute. This is nice for small pots. The timers that have the red and green trippers for shutting on and off will not work. The smallest increment of time for adjustment is 1 hour. Home Depot has the one I have for $20, has a battery backup and it's easy to program.
 

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rimfire

rimfire

Active Member
Hope this covers it and you find this useful. When you consider one of your plants has the potential to be worth hundreds of dollars, why not protect your babies with an under $50 watering system that is easy to make and works like a champ. Here are Dr.'s Biggie Small and White Ice 23 days into bloom in my Hempy Bucket SCROG. Happy farming.
 

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Hags

Hags

Well-Known Member
fucking finally. been looking all over for this! youd think more people would have to do this...
 
time2gro

time2gro

Active Member
damn dude that shit is bad
so can i turn my dwc in to a hempy or do i have to make all the roots go back into the pots??
 
J

Jizzmaster0

New Member
Totally, nobody has shit on a simple individual bucket watering system w a timer. Now I can get somethig together that makes sense. Good work
 
hugetom80s

hugetom80s

Well-Known Member
This sort of thing would work great for even regular house plants. My brother with his black thumb could finally stop killing every fern he gets.

The best part of this DIY is it's simple and cheap enough it's good for any application.
 
wonderblunder

wonderblunder

Well-Known Member
You can use 1 or 2 gph driplines if you dont want to buy a cycle timer. Just run pump for a for desired amount of water to each plant. I did this with a plastic trashcan. Worked great, Only problem is I like to rotate my plants daily, and moving the irrigation is a pain in the butt. Any size pump will work on drip fittings really, even the cheapest ones. Nice thread and instructions. Im glad somebody spelled it out.
 
J

Jizzmaster0

New Member
Jesus this is brilliant, dont even need a flood table if u dial it in even for 1 min a day would be good to top off....depending on res size. Harbor freight.com has a cheap irr. kit w drippers and tubing. then u get a small 142 gph water pump for $13 on there too. Your most of the way home then...just need an air pump and res to put it together. Beautiful
 
Jumbo

Jumbo

Active Member
I tried this approach to autowatering a pair of 5-gallon hempy buckets two years ago when we were out of town for ten days. My hempy buckets have a 1/2" hole set at 2" from the bottom just like most people's. However, I siliconed 1/2" plastic pipes through the overflow holes & then ran these drain pipes back to my 14 gallon temporary resevoir. I just put a pair of holes in the resevoir top to accomodate these drain pipes.

Then, I put a small submersible pump in the resevoir & ran 1/4" supply lines from the pump to the top of the hempy buckets & added a pair of 1 gph drippers. I used a simple mechanical 24hr timer (around 9 bucks) & set it for it's smallest time ... 15 min. per 24hrs. As the pump supplied 15 min. of watering per day, the overflow drain pipes sent any overflow back into the resevoir. It makes the system into a recirculating one ... but with very little recirculation due to the limited 15 minute watering time per day.

After over ten days of this system being in operation, I came home to very happy & healthy plants. Of course this approach shouldn't be used indefinately without occassionally changing out the nute water in the resevoir. It's all a bit cumbersome to setup but works like a charm & keeps you from killing your plants while traveling.

Jumbo
 
U

unemployed

Member
Man, I feel like an idiot. That was so obvious. You would not believe the wild complicated ideas some people have come up with for an auto-watering system (not ME of course) and this is so obvious and simple!
 
Dr.J20

Dr.J20

Well-Known Member
Jumbo said:
I tried this approach to autowatering a pair of 5-gallon hempy buckets two years ago when we were out of town for ten days. My hempy buckets have a 1/2" hole set at 2" from the bottom just like most people's. However, I siliconed 1/2" plastic pipes through the overflow holes & then ran these drain pipes back to my 14 gallon temporary resevoir. I just put a pair of holes in the resevoir top to accomodate these drain pipes.

Then, I put a small submersible pump in the resevoir & ran 1/4" supply lines from the pump to the top of the hempy buckets & added a pair of 1 gph drippers. I used a simple mechanical 24hr timer (around 9 bucks) & set it for it's smallest time ... 15 min. per 24hrs. As the pump supplied 15 min. of watering per day, the overflow drain pipes sent any overflow back into the resevoir. It makes the system into a recirculating one ... but with very little recirculation due to the limited 15 minute watering time per day.

After over ten days of this system being in operation, I came home to very happy & healthy plants. Of course this approach shouldn't be used indefinately without occassionally changing out the nute water in the resevoir. It's all a bit cumbersome to setup but works like a charm & keeps you from killing your plants while traveling.

Jumbo
Click to expand...
Hey man i've been playing with schemes just like the one you describe...what do you think about adding an air stone to the res?
thanks for spelling out a great, efficient system man
-Dr.J
 
benjamin alexander

benjamin alexander

Active Member
ive done the exact same thing but ill be using a supersoil mix and osmocote plus organic, do a search on doc bud osmocote plus hempy buckets- shits unreal, stoner proof! but i've connected a 20l res with a float valve built in hoohed up to a hard line tap running r/o water, means i dont even need to refill the res or mix any nutes throughout the entire grow!
 
benjamin alexander

benjamin alexander

Active Member
oh and yeah ive got an air pump and 4 airstones in the same tub, helps keep the water fresh and i figure if the more oxygen the better then why not?
 
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