NIWA Smartphone Control of your Hydroponic Garden

I recently learned about a new product concept for an indoor hydroponic garden that looks like it has potential.

NIWA (www.getniwa.com) is a pretty slick looking 5 liter recirculating hydroponic system with lights and automation controlled from your smartphone.

Compared to the Aquafarm from Back to the Roots, this looks like a more serious food production system. The Aquafarm is a nice, compact system that can grow some herbs and is a good introduction to aquaponic gardening, the NIWA looks to be able to produce some serious food, and I suspect the price will reflect this increase in performance. NIWA claims to be able to grow tomatoes, strawberries, orchids, or medical plants.

Ive been in contact with Aga, one of the founders of NIWA, and asked about integration with a fish tank for an aquaponic system. While they havent yet worked with any aquaponic experts to determine what would need to be done to the system to integrate aquaponics, they will be offering a maker-kit on the kickstarter which will include the electronics and gear inside with instructions to build the system on your own. I can imagine this could be used to hack an aquaponic version.

Some of my favorite features:

Automatic nutrient and irrigation adjustment for different plants. You dont have to do additional research, just tell NIWA what youre growing, and the nutrients and irrigation cycles are adjusted to optimize growth. Or, if you want to experiment, you can manually adjust the settings.

Automatic heating, ventilation, humidity, and lighting control. NIWA claims to monitor climate. In the system and automatically adjusts for optimal growth. If there is enough light in the room, the lights will be off.  If the room isnt bright enough, NIWA will sense this and turn on the grow lights.

Cloud connectivity lets you monitor and adjust the system from anywhere with an internet connection.

NIWA is getting ready to launch their kickstarter campaign on Monday, May 12, 2014.

The kicstarter prices are not too bad.  I dont know if itll fit into my budget, but I definitely want to try this thing out!

www.getniwa.com

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Apartment Aquaponic System disassembled

The 105 gallon system set up in my friends apartment in Philly was disassembled yesterday.  Well be moving most of the components to the greenhouse that were building in Wilmington, Delaware.  We already have a 330 gallon IBC tank waiting, and were going to be building a PVC hoop house.  Well be attaching the grow bed from the apartment system to the IBC system as well.  Also, I have obtained some old windows to make some coldframes at the same location.  Lots of excitement coming this Spring, but it was a little sad to take apart the system that I had worked so hard and long on.  We did harvest about 2 supermarket bags full of kale, and I filetd the tilapia we had living in the apartment system.  Im sure Ill have tons of updates and photos from the Wilmington garden this Spring.

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