The Tomato Watering Project

As a proof of concept, we set up an small piece of terrain to grow tomatoes.

Tomatoes need to be planted in the nodes of a 40x60 grid, to allow them to have room to grow. We choose to plant eight plants.

After digging 40 cm deep all the surface, we put some compost that we prepared past winter.
Once the compost was distributed and mixed properly, we marked the nodes, and did small holes on them.

To warrant some success, we put 5 seed on each node.
To give a proper watering, eigth droppers were installed, one per node.

We choose a 16 mm. Pipe that run across all the nodes, and afterwards to a small building having five old 1000 litre cisterns (where the rainfall will be stored in the future, at this time, the watering pipe is connected to the main water supply through a faucet).

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A view of the experiment area
A dropper giving water.
Since a faucet is not adequate for remote control, I'm in the process of replacing it by an electrovalve. So far, I've found there are two kinds of electrovalves, industrial and for home use. The main differences are price (industrial ones are cheaper) and activation voltage (For industrial ones is 24v, whilst home use may variate, 9v, 12v, etc.) Since our business is not to waste, I choose the industrial ones.Another advantage of the industrial electrovalves is the ability of manually open the water flow, (in the case of fault in the control system). By turning anti-cloclwise the activator (the element on the top) the flow is opened. This saves a bypass circuit.