PET Bottle Plant Autowaterer Tray

prusaprinters

<p>I am a very bad plant mom, and I was planning to build a closed loop soil watering system, but that is still on my to-do list!</p> <p>I remembered the trick my grandma used to provide fresh water for her chickens with an inverted bottle, and thought to do the same for our plants.</p> <p>The bottle cap comes from dpruim, which worked for me flawlessly! Thank you. <a href="https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3732066">https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3732066</a></p> <p>Use a thick PET bottle (best are the 0.5 liter multi-use versions) which can tolerate a slight vacuum. If your country lacks the luxury of reusable bottles, try glass. You will have to experiment with the thread a little bit then. You should only print the cap until you dial in a good fit. If it leaks, try some PTFE tape.</p> <p>For reference, my bottle is a half-liter reusable (Mehrweg) sparkling water bottle from Germany. The thread should be the same on most bottles tho. The bottle is unmodified.</p> <p>In OpenSCAD you can tweak the diameter and the height of tray, also the pipe diameter, which will determine how high the water level is in the tray. Beware that very thin pipes won't work, I'd say 6mm diameter is the minimum! Also the longer the distance between the bottle and the tray, the bigger the minimum diameter should be.<br/> (Customizer is broken, so you should download the file and open it in OpenSCAD.)</p> <p>The plant itself is not part of the model, and must be bought IRL. :/<br/> It is a Zamioculcas, if you're into that.</p> <p>If you enjoyed this design of mine, please consider supporting me with a few coins: <a href="https://ko-fi.com/zoe1337">https://ko-fi.com/zoe1337</a> &lt;83</p> <h3>Print instructions</h3><p>Prints easily. I sliced with PrusaSlicer and used 3 perimeters. Used a bit of overextrusion to make sure it's watertight.</p> <p>The top fill pattern is Archimedean Chords, bottom fill pattern is Octagram Spiral, looks very cool in light. 5 solid bottom and top layers (each).</p> <p>Seam position is set to random.</p>