Mistking Hack to keep youre plants watered

[BryanP]

OK so I've asked before and did some research with adding irrigation drip emitters to my mist king to keep my plants watered.

Well, I recently had an opportunity to redo my enclosure and I took it as chance to experiment with adding an emitter and individual drip lines.

I have 2 mist nozzles and I added a tee before the 1st ontop of the cage.

I added a 0.5gal/hour drip emitter onto that tee section and the a 4 line manifold. Added a drip line to each plant that I wanted to water and then another 0.5gal/hour drip head on the end of each line.

here is a diagram!

my plants are loving it and other than maybe a 3-5 second period of time at the beginning of the mist cycle where the lines fill and the system pressurizies I see only a slightly decreased amount of mist but seriously the benefits of watering my plants automatically is worth the trade off!

The initial 0.5gal emitter that is after the tee but before the manifold is to limit the water into that leg of the system to 0.5gal/hour. Doing the math, that works out to 0.125gal/hour per line. The emitter at the plant is to give back pressure to allow the whole manifold to fill up.

 

[Beman]

This could work well if your not running really long sessions like I do. I would kill off all my plants if I did this since I run three 6-7 minute misting sessions.
Mistking does make a ball valve you can add to your line after the T on the plant line. This would make it to where you could manually turn off the pressure to this line and turn it on when you want. So you can then control what days your actually watering.

 

[BryanP]

This could work well if your not running really long sessions like I do. I would kill off all my plants if I did this since I run three 6-7 minute misting sessions.
Mistking does make a ball valve you can add to your line after the T on the plant line. This would make it to where you could manually turn off the pressure to this line and turn it on when you want. So you can then control what days your actually watering.

Oh yeah my longest misting session is only 2min 30 seconds. With the 2 nozzles in my 2x2x4 it's enough to get the water dripping for a good 30sec while it's misting and about 1min after.

I also run a dripper for about 30min 3x a week.

The ball valve is an interesting idea although I would love to automate that as well just like my dropper. I'm trying to find a way to automate refilling that as well

 

[ChamelaChameleon]

My plants are not arranged correctly. Some are getting too much water and light. I'm gonna redo the enclosure next weekend. I'm trying to layer- thirst/sun and moist/partial sun - moving hibiscus to top layer and money tree to second layer. Meanwhile, I just purchased a bunch of plants that I probably can't use, ugh.

 

[Beman]

My plants are not arranged correctly. Some are getting too much water and light. I'm gonna redo the enclosure next weekend. I'm trying to layer- thirst/sun and moist/partial sun - moving hibiscus to top layer and money tree to second layer. Meanwhile, I just purchased a bunch of plants that I probably can't use, ugh.

Hibiscus is going to grow like crazy under plant lighting.... Keep this in mind... Every time I do a massive trim on my two that sit on the bottom within a month they have regrown 2 feet back to the top.

Put a 1 inch layer of the clay balls in the bottom of the pots. Use some mesh in the very bottom so the balls do not fall out. They are called hydroballs. This will let the pot drain excess water better.