Self watering plant pot

thingiverse

Self watering plant pot. Fill the bottle once a week (more in summer). Don't forget anymore to give your plants the water they need. No need to change batteries from an Arduino powered sensor. Just print the pot, add a 500ml PET-bottle and put a rope in the plant pot. The rope will water the soil in the pot, the bottle keeps the outer pot filled with about 3 to 10mm of water, refilling automatically when the water level drops. Part of the fun of this design is that you use an ordinary PET-bottle and let the plants drink just like you do :) Refilling is easy: take out the bottle, refill it at the tap and put it back. Because it is transparent you see exactly how much water remains. Use a 500ml bottle, make a 10mm hole in the cap and put a stainless screw (about 25mm) in it to make the water-depth adjustable; put it upside down in the outer pot. It is fit for a 11,3cm plant pot (I buy herbs in such a pot in the super market), about 10cm high. The basil and mint grow very very well in these pots. Put a rope in it that has capilary function (I use a 6mm thick rope). For soil with high organic content it sucks the water out of the pot like a sponge and the soil gets pretty wet. Solution is to lower the bottle with the screw so less water is in the outer pot, or to use a smaller diameter rope, or to use soil with a lesser organic content (add more sand). In summer they are outside and always moist enough, never dry up. Once a week I refill the bottles. It takes about 14h to print on my Ultimaker 2. I made 8 of these for herbs near my kitchen. If you add fertilizer the plant may grow harder (the mint defenitely did!) but the water will become green with algae as you can see on the picture. If it wouldn't be transparant filament (and bottle) then the growth would be much less. But we have enough spare bottles when the old one can't be cleaned well anymore.