Down the Hydro Trail

Continuing down the trail…. Part II. It’s been a whole year since I wrote Part I: several more gray hairs and sore muscles later, we have completed the next “hydro home.” It was a project my wife, Madelyn, and I eagerly pursued, continuing our quest for homeowner-friendly hydroponics gardening in a heating-efficient and cost-effective home. The new home was designed with a hydroponics/guest suite in the sunlit, walkout basement. The basement was not only designed for ease of testing and gardening, but is a comfortable place for visiting family, friends and colleagues. Once my wife and I reached the agreement that the gardens and research need a special place in the home that is not the living room, we decided that a large family room was the ticket. As always, we try to balance considerations like these with resale potential down the road.

We started by selecting a lot with nice views and good eastern and southern exposures for a walkout basement. Madelyn dusted off the cad program and began the design of the home. We looked through many home magazines and plans, incorporating various ideas and our own past experience into the design. After this design groundwork, we had our lumberyard draft the actual blueprint. (For anyone interested, a good web site with thousands of home plans is www.dreamhomesource.com/Search.asp. This site even has a home-cost calculator for different regions of the U.S.). We would actually prefer our next building project be a ready-made plan (minor alterations are a given) because it does save time and effort. When it comes to keeping costs down, our motto is to be flexible with design details and finish material, for instance, by planning well in advance you can often get high-end fixtures for the same price as very average ones by buying those clearance deals when you happen upon them. Building material suppliers put clearance prices on all kinds of rejected, mishandled special orders. Of course, you have to be willing and able to stockpile the stuff. The attic of our last home was full of these deals for this new home – and we continue to keep a lookout for that next project.

The new home is a colonial cape cod with carriage-house garage – New England style for a more unique touch in the Midwest – with walkout basement. South and east sides end up with fully three stories of passive solar. The east side (the back) ushers in sunlit mornings on all three levels; abundant windows grace two of the basement’s four sides and make for a basement more sunlit than most homes. All this is easy to plan: just pull out your compass, minimize windows to the north, and create some form of northern buffer. On this one, we used the garage and a natural tree line as the northern buffer. Overhangs and deciduous trees are effective for minimizing summer heat gain in the south, east, and west. Blinds and lined curtains also work well for blocking summer heat.

The hydro lab is in the basement’s southeast corner. Through a double sliding glass door there is a 7x7 lexan polycarbonate greenhouse attached to the home. A retaining wall creates another sheltered area for outdoor testing. When the sun is shining and it’s below 20° F outside, the greenhouse remains in the high 80s. The sliding door can be opened to add heat to the house during the day while the home helps heat the greenhouse at night. I’ve found that leaving the door open just three inches at night keeps the temperature above freezing in the greenhouse even when the thermometer plunges to 0° F outside. Additionally, humidity from the systems helps with the home’s dry forced-air heat. The greenhouse has mechanical vents in the lower wall and ceiling which open and close automatically according to the temperature. The reservoirs in the house act as heat sinks (part of the passive solar details), and the greenhouse reservoirs have stainless steel heaters for extra cold nights. We had hoped to put in a large water reservoir under the basement floor for a heat sink but, unfortunately, we hit rock while digging out for the basement. This would have worked well for a gravity feed system down to additional backyard gardens. Maybe next time…

Inside, the garden area is equipped with a kitchenette for visitors and hose bibs plumbed off the side of the cabinets. The water system is additionally plumbed with a low cost Easy Grow automatic fertilization system. This system can be adjusted for automatic nutrient mixing and foliar feeding. A flexible wand on a Coil Solutions hose connects to the hose bibs for easy, no-mess watering. The greenhouse has an Alluminator reflector sporting the new Gavita 600w reflector lamp. Both the reflector and lamp have proven excellent distribution and performance. The Gavita lamp is quite impressive. Pipe Dreams, with a Nutradip tri-meter, is the newcomer to the greenhouse and has cilantro, Peking peppers, bamboo, and dill. The tri-meter is a tried and true performer – one of the most reliable instruments I’ve used. This illuminated meter eliminates the need for disturbing the plants by turning on the lights to view your meter at night. The Dutch Garden is loaded with tomato plants and ready to climb the 12’ ceiling of the greenhouse. The AeroFlo inside is loaded with Anaheim chili and Scotch bonnet pepper plants, Swiss chard, and dill. The Radiant reflector is performing well above average. A banana tree, an orange tree, cherry tomatoes, chili peppers, and a Christmas cactus are growing in square hydroponic units. The terracotta ones are the new, four-site Garden of Ease unit which I designed and which hits the market Spring 2002. This unit was designed expressly for ease of use. For any of you who have ever lost plants to power outages, it utilizes a new concept. In the Garden of Ease, the plants sit in nutrient at all times. The plants continually bask in fully oxygenated nutrient solution, taking up only that which is needed at any given moment. There are no timers or cycles to set. Milwaukee’s portable tri-meter works well for moving between the various systems.

Finally, I want to close with some important information about the Garden of Ease: it is the debut product for the new Hydro for Hunger program. The program will assist the Institute of Simplified Hydroponics (ISH), as well as other nonprofit organizations as the program expands. For this first year, each Garden of Ease unit sold generates money (a percentage of the profits) that goes unconditionally to ISH for education and development of hydroponics for starving people around the world. Their motto is: give people fish and you feed them for a day, but teach them how to fish and they feed themselves for a lifetime. Currently, over 30,000 children die from starvation each month. (Further information on the Institute for Simplified Hydroponics can be found at www.carbon.org). The Hydro For Hunger program is designed to help bring hydroponics manufacturers together in an alliance that works toward ending world hunger – and where everyone wins. Each year there will be a competition for the next year’s featured product: the company that comes up with the most innovative product and marketing program wins. ISH will be the judge of this competition. The Garden of Ease is the initial product release for the Hydro for Hunger program.