Self watering plant pot

thingiverse

Self-Watering Planter Pot: Fill the Bottle Once a Week (More in Summer) Don't forget 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, while the bottle keeps the outer pot filled with about 3 to 10mm of water, refilling automatically when the water level drops. The fun part of this design is using an ordinary PET bottle and letting plants drink just like humans do. Refilling is easy: take out the bottle, refill it at the tap, and put it back. Because it's transparent, you can see exactly how much water remains. Use a 500ml bottle, make a 10mm hole in the cap, and insert a stainless screw (about 25mm) to make the water-depth adjustable; place it upside down in the outer pot. This planter is suitable for an 11.3cm plant pot (you can buy herbs in such pots at supermarkets). Basil and mint grow extremely well in these pots. Put a rope with capillary function (I use a 6mm thick rope) into it. For soil with high organic content, it sucks the water out of the pot like a sponge, making the soil very wet. The solution is to lower the bottle using the screw so less water is in the outer pot or to use a smaller diameter rope or to use soil with lesser organic content (add more sand). In summer, they're outside and stay moist enough, never drying up. Once a week, I refill the bottles. It takes about 14 hours to print on my Ultimaker 2. I made eight of these planters for herbs near my kitchen. If you add fertilizer, the plant may grow harder (the mint definitely did!), but the water will become green with algae as shown in the picture. If it weren't for transparent filament and a bottle, growth would be much less. But we have enough spare bottles when the old one can't be cleaned well anymore.