Water Only Thirsty Plants

One of the best way to water plant into our apartments is to use a pump for a drop irrigation.
It is the best because it is nice to see, unless we hide pipes very well, but it is the best because it is easy to setup and also fast when we leave home for days.

Problem is that you need to give the correct quantity of water, keeping the humidity at the correct level and every a specified range of time.

Here I present an alternative to the Arduino approach.

The advantage here it that you have less cabling, no power supply and status of the plant is on cloud so you can monitor humidity and temperature from remote, and eventually switch on or off manually or even change parameters.

For this we can use two products from Shelly born to setup a smart home.

Shelly H&T :https://shelly.cloud/shelly-humidity-and-temperatu...

Second item can be one from those: Shelly Plug, Shelly 1, Shelly 2.5. Since I'm using the last one here is his link:

https://shelly.cloud/shelly-25-wifi-smart-relay-ro...

... but Shelly 1 will be cheaper.

The sensor is powered by a battery that really last at least one year, while the switch always connected to the power line using just 1W of power. Both of them shall be paired with your wifi using your cell phone.

Other material:

- pump for aquarium

- pipe

- dripper

- water container, like a half plastic bottle

Setup is very fast, just connect the pipe to the pump and the dripper over the plant and put the pump into the water close to the plan.

Put the sensor over the ground of the plant and cover it with a "plastic glass".

The power connection to the switch is just four wires as in the picture, where the two black are the line and the two colored are going to the pump.

You need to have the two Shelly already in your account and paired with your cell using Shelly app.

Once they are in the app you need to create a "scene", lets call "water".

In the scene you choose a condition. The condition will be humidity that is over a certain limit. At the moment I see that 65% is a good limit for this plant.

Then it is also important to setup that the condition will be valid for a certain period of time, here 500 minutes, so it will happen again not before that. May be a good idea is to work on a day base that is 1440 minutes.

At the end of the scene you need to setup the action, here it is to switch on the pump.

This will end the definition of the scene.

But we do not want to keep on the pump for ever, so we need to define how many seconds pump will run, and in this example I put 60 seconds.

That's all.

Obviously all these parameters can be changed also from remote, may be from the beach, where you may give a look to the humidity and the temperature of the plant.