How to Build a Dutch Bucket Deep Water Hydroponic System (Full Video)

[Music] okay well here's the 10 by 12 greenhouse it's ready for filling up as you can see it's empty so got pretty good space in here i put the the fisheye lens on there just so you can see everything inside anyway we're gonna get started on building some benches to put the hydroponic system on [Music] okay so we don't have anything screwed together anything done just got a couple pieces of wood down and we're gonna do a quick run see how it looks and let's do it [Music] okay so as you can see um got 11 buckets they're all sitting good i don't think that they're too crowded i think that you know there's enough work space on either side pretty much the back side is just going to be used for any kind of plumbing if we decide the front side is also going to be used for plumbing and then we just need to make sure to cover this pressure treated wood because i don't want any plants that are touching pressure treated wood so we're going to cover that with a little polyurethane and i think we're good to go this can handle quite a bit of weight so i think we'll be good with all the water and all the whole situation we're putting plastic sheets over the the tables and it's six millimeters so the so the plants don't touch the pressure pressurized wood [Music] just in case it goes too fast in time lapse anyway we're just using a couple of these simpson ties just to keep the two boards together they shouldn't fall apart there's not going to be too much weight on either side but california and earthquakes just in case we get some tremors these will stop them from at least falling on the floor [Music] all right well we've got 22 buckets i got 11 buckets on each side they're all four gallon buckets we got them off uline.com they ended up coming in 24 hours it was pretty quick these are all food grade buckets remember to use food grade instead of just a regular bucket you don't want leaching of any products into your food so anyway we've got 22 buckets and we're going to start building the system pretty excited all right jackson go put the lids boom so we ended up grabbing um the lids to the buckets we were originally going to use the fancy uh square lids with the basket tops on them for hydroponics except during this quarantine time um just no supply unable some of the companies went out of business so what we're going to do is we're going to end up popping holes in these and just putting six or six inch or three inch bucket baskets into the top so we'll just cut them in and do it ourselves [Music] all right we talked about starting with the dutch buckets so in order to make a dutch bucket got your bucket food grade not gonna leach any chemicals into it whatever size you choose i went with a four gallon ordered them off u-line like we talked about since i couldn't get the custom tops which come with a basket because of the quarantine process right now i ended up ordering six inch baskets off of amazon i don't know they're maybe about a buck a piece two bucks a piece and then i'm just gonna go ahead and stencil a ring now to stencil the ring you don't want to stencil the ring the same size as the pot because the pot will drop through so there is a lip on the pot you have to find something it doesn't matter what could be your foam roller but it ends up being that the foam roller fits exactly right onto the top there which means the lip will catch so i will use that as my stencil so foam rollers can be used for more than just rolling your back all right the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to use the drill i'm going to pop holes into all of these buckets and then i'll use the jigsaw to cut out the circles [Music] okay so we had a bucket got the lid got the pots made a circle or stencil then we popped in a pilot hole with a drill then we used the jigsaw to cut out the top and now it fits nice and flush and we're ready to figure out our water level and then we'll finish up all the tops we'll finish up our water levels and then we will begin the pvc [Music] process [Music] hey guys okay i'm back again and today we're going to start putting together the deep water dutch bucket system so normally when you see a dutch bucket system you'll see a square bucket or you'll see a round bucket either way at the bucket and you've got a hole down here so you will see some form of pvc pipe for the drain coming out here now using a siphon that will give you a water level around this low the problem is i'm going to be using these netting pots and what i would like to do is have a deep water system with much more water in the bucket these are about four inches deep and if you see when i drop that into here this hole up here will allow the bottom inch or so to be into the net pot when i throw this drainage tube in that will then give me the ability to have a deeper water more nutrients in it sitting so that when these roots do grow all over the place in here that'll give them much better nutrient uptake and it'll also be able to work better at draining out the water from a higher level now if you want to drain from a lower level you can extend instead of just having an elbow which as you can see keeps the water level here you can add a piece of pvc to go lower and then that will also drain you down to a lower level if you'd like the opposite way is staying with that same dutch bucket system hole down here much lower one or two inches off of the bottom and then reversing that situation and making your pvc pipe come up to the top the problem with that is i don't want any leaks or anything happening here uh at some point and then all of my water draining out and then all of these roots hanging in the air so i'm going to attempt to use the net pot system and not use any guards or netting i may decide to put a cover over the over the outtake here but i'm not going to have a big netting sitting inside there i want the roots to be free and to be able to be wherever they want to be in that solution so let's get started all right so sizing out the pipe is also an issue so i'm going to have a drain out outtake that comes along the edge of this table here so i would like my buckets to be in the center of the table and that will give me about five inches to come out and then down and it'll also give me about a um i think it's about eight inches down to the bottom here so what i've done was i took half inch uh schedule 40 pvc made my five inch and then i gave myself a 10 inch piece here and what i did was i just stuck a 5 8 inch grommet around the end and then i'll go ahead and pop that through this hole and it's going to take a little bit of force uh to get them through and that will allow the water to come out siphon down into the drain so let's get that going just really quickly also some tools that you'll need you'll need some way of cutting the pvc pipe i just grabbed one of these husky pvc pipe cutters i think it was eight bucks at home depot i've got a one inch drill bit tape measure and i find that instead of putting soap and oil and all these things on the grommets which then ends up going into your into your solution uh just use one of these to kind of push around the edge all these grommets end up coming with you know the little double edge there i don't know if you can see that but this pushing on that just kind of feed it all the way in will pop it right through these buckets much easier and then there's no chemicals there's a real nice seal on there so i'm gonna get to it [Music] okay so i guess there are some people like me who haven't cut very much pvc this is a pvc cutter i figured i would just orient you to it really quick basically it opens by popping it super simple you just [Music] right through the tube super simple um i know there's saws and there's electrical stuff but just if you're just doing a few little things it's really nice and handy to have one of these things you get your line or your mark or wherever you want it to be i know this is how long i want my extension pieces to be so you just kind of line it up and it's as simple as just cutting [Music] right through so very simple very easy and anybody can do that [Music] okay the next part that we have to do is we have to get the drainage pipe okay which is going to go all the way along here connected to the table so before i mark out all of the spots i'm actually going to fix it to the table and then i'm going to mark the spots that way i know exactly where they're going to be so i'm going to use two inch galvanized tube straps and will hold it right on [Music] so now you can see that the drain spouts the outtakes of each of the buckets lines up perfectly with the top of the pipe so now i'm going to go get a drill bit i'm going to go ahead and drill the holes so that they can easily rest right into them and then we will know exactly where they need to sit from now on [Music] now that we've got them drilled i used a wood drill bit as you noticed um there are pipe fitting drill bits but basically i made the drill bit made the holes it's all good um i'm going to just use a dremel tool just to clean up the edges you can use a file sandpaper scratch it on a rock whatever you want but i'm just going to use a dremel tool clean up the edges and then we should be good to go so now that we've got all of the holes made and we've got the edges all cleaned up remember all of this debris is still inside this tube so each one of these tubes i've blown out um and cleaned out so that we don't end up plugging up the system later because we're going to end up putting in smaller outtakes that are going to go into each of these buckets and these little shavings will clog up the system so it's going to get a little loud but i'm going to use an air compressor and just blow it out all right so now that we have the ends all cleaned out we can now get everything roughly lined up into each hole and it should be pretty well set set up at this point it's great so the next phase is uh get the plumbing into the reservoir and then we will work on the pump back out okay so the next part is getting the dirty water or outtake water out of these buckets into the reservoir so i'm going to go ahead and throw a t piece in i'm not going to go to the terminal end like i was thinking at the beginning i've got concrete blocks under here and i don't want to try and make an elbow into an elbow into another connector down into another elbow it's just going to be four or five pieces to get back into the reservoir underneath this t-piece right here will actually let me just go about a foot straight down into the bucket so that's probably what we're going to do let's get some t-piece on so what i've done here is there is a couple marks where the t-piece is going to go i've cut all the way into the join and now i'm going to line up my cutter with the lines that i've made there's one [Applause] there's two now this should allow me to get here and here and fasten together there's your t-piece don't forget to put on the end cap [Music] [Music] so we went under uh six inches that's approximately right here right on the logo so we're gonna punch a hole through the top and that's where it's gonna go [Music] you return water or dirty water coming back into this hole here we're going to pop another hole in and that will give us the the space to run the line from the pump and also the cable or the electrical cord out so how do you know how full your reservoir is if you you know don't come along every single day and pop it open also the problem is with our system is there's not very much clearance under there because i wanted to have a nice large cooler under there for my reservoir and as you can see you can't see through it so what we're going to do is we're going to put in a little empty to full meter and basically it's very simple we're just going to take some 5 8 tubing uh run it into a couple brass i'll put the links below um brass connectors with you know so you've got one spacer to make through the side wall you've got an elbow and then just another vertical um pipe tubing thread to a piping thread so anyway that's going to end up going right through here if you can see and as the water goes down in the reservoir then the water will also go down the meter will go down here so then we'll be able to just take quick looks and know where our water meter is where our water level is and it'll just make it easier for us just ran into a little bit of lady luck um i completely forgot or didn't even think about the outtake valve on these big coolers so this is a coleman cooler and it has an outtake valve with some threading on it and i've got a 5 8 inch coupling or extender which is going to be the part that we were going to drill through the side here i was going to stick this through and then i was going to connect on to the elbow well i just put this inside just to see what would happen and it really snugs down and when i torque on it it twists right into there and it's going to work perfectly so this with a little bit of um caulking inside there is going to save me drilling through the side piece um the side wall so at a later date you know that's going to prevent more leakage so pretty pretty cool this is basically what we're going to do this is the outtake it's going to be coming right back in here like this and hopefully i'm not going to bore you with the whole thing but the water is going to go down and as it fills up you should see right here if you want to come in close starting to tell us how much water is in the cooler all right so that's a super fast easy way of getting to know how much is inside this thing without having to rip it out all the time and drive yourself nuts so this should make it really easy to be able to see how much is in decide how much we want to add to it also we'll be able to get a sample if you want to just turn this down here put a sample in your cup and then you'll be able to check out your ph and all of your nutrient levels and then you know we can just go ahead and refill no problem what we have now is we want to make the irrigation line feed into each bucket so what i've decided to do was originally i wanted to hang it along the top maybe behind but if you're actually working with something all the time this and there's tomatoes and that's that's going to be a pain in the butt so what i think is the best is to keep everything right here table level that way you can just handle it and work with it and i think that'll be better for me so what we're going to do is on each end is going to be exactly the same there's going to be a elbow which is going to pop into each end okay so each of those ends are going to have an elbow which is going to give us the opportunity to run down out around or later in the future do other things with it on this end down here i have a end cap on the elbow so this elbow these are rain bird elbows and you know irrigation pieces this is a rain bird cap so you just pop the cap into the end there and that's the end of the line so they hold on really really well i've had them at pretty good pretty good pressures too so let me pop this one in here then i will pop the cap in okay so the next part is i'm going to go ahead and secure down all of the irrigation line in a row [Music] okay so trying to get the system to be easy for you on a day-to-day basis or easy for me on a day-to-day basis is you've got a big reservoir down here and you can't see through it but we figured out the see-through part with the gauge to tell us how much is in there but when we are adding water or when we need to check the pump or when we need to take it out the problem is is if you have all of these lines that are running really snug through these you know top holes pulling it out can actually jumble and disassemble things so what i've done was i decided that we're going to put an elbow on the end here another elbow just to keep it clean and then we're going to run along from that elbow okay into this is a pvc adapter compression adapter so it goes from .70 tubing into a half inch coupling and then what you do is you run another piece of your half inch pvc into that like so okay and then you're able to shove it into this quick disconnect so that when you do the same thing on the other side and you run in another let's shove in another piece here while we're at it okay there we go so now what's going to happen is when it's time for us to do any maintenance or do whatever we want to do you can just simply undo it and then you can pull out what needs to be pulled out you don't have to disrupt the whole system so these are these are really really interesting i probably spent about five bucks um but when it comes to disconnecting things and and messing up the ends and sometimes these these uh these lines even though you know everybody says that they don't leak sometimes they leak and the more that you manipulate them it's just the same with everything else you know if it's a washer if it's a gasket if it's plastic if it's rubber after a while manipulating things and wiggling and torquing on things it does cause them to break down so the less that you mess with it the better it'll be anyway this is what it's going to look like i'm going to go ahead and stick this end on here as well this elbow connector it's kind of short so you got to shove it in there kind of tight let me see if i can push it on the ground and then i'm going to connect this one onto here to give us that 90 degree elbow that we were talking about okay and then our quick disconnect will come under move the plastic out of the way and i'm gonna shove this one together okay so now this whole assembly is under here very clean out of the way and when it's time to run this into the tank all we have to do is do a disconnect of the valve of the of the uh the union it's called the pvc union so there we go so we've got our outtake we've got our intake now i'm going to pop some holes along the lines into each bucket so that we can start running the uh running the fluid through the system okay so real quick i just wanted to go over this is what i chose to use this time just because it was real cheap on amazon if i can find the link i'll throw it down there it's just vivosun submersible pump uh puts out about 800 gallons per hour i'm gonna be running 11 buckets on this side and then simultaneously i'll be running also on the other side the same system so for redundancy i just went with 800 i know you can get up higher or lower but what's really nice is on top of these they have a real nice threading into a 5 8 inch top and they're all adjustable so it comes with three or four adjustable nozzles and that will pop perfectly right in here and you can throw a hose clamp on there if you want or not but um super easy runs right in not a big deal the next part or the final part actually to getting the tubing set is here's our pump inside the reservoir okay it's going to be sitting there like we said we just connected on to the irrigation tubing and because i'm trying to run a straight line you don't have to put in all these connections and cables if you you know and connectors if you don't want to but i really like the ability to run them straight and it's kind of nice to have everything really easy accessible and easy to disconnect instead of having things loop because what will happen is if you just run the line or the irrigation hose straight down in without putting any connectors in what's going to happen is it'll run down into this reservoir or into your reservoir and basically the line is going to have enough tension on it to keep your pump all over the place so your pump is going to go all over the place i know that you can put little suction cups that come with these things but the suction cup is not going to hold the tension of one of these lines pulling on it constantly and then you'll have more water in your reservoir underneath your pump and then you can also you know suck up other things that you don't want to be sucking up you want it to be nice and flat the way that the pump was designed so that's what we'll do is get this through here also your power cable needs to be coming out and easily accessible and take an elbow shove the elbow right down on there and that gives you a nice flat pump on the inside easily accessible and again just to remind you you know we put the disconnect on here so if you want to do a quick disconnect to pull this in and out you can do that just like this to pull it free instead of moving this while this is all under here and finally locked down that will probably be the best quickest and also best looking system to keep it just clean for you real simple this is just a little popper tool it'll uh pop the holes into the irrigation lines so we're gonna pop one for each bucket [Music] something i like to do is i like to be able to work with one bucket at a time or i like to be able to shut off certain buckets um say i want to clean this bucket and i want everything to keep going i don't want to have to shut off the system or pinch the the line what i do is i take one of these little shutoff valves and each bucket has its own valve so everything can be independent in the system and that way you will able to clean change stop or run the ones that you want so this is quarter inch tubing which has a quarter inch shutoff valve which can poke right into the half inch irrigation tubing and we'll pop them all in and see how it goes [Music] all right well it's the moment of truth so let's plug her in see if it all works kind of excited so oh i hear it i hear it going so all right she's going she's going going going going going all right it's going all the way along very cool so each one is going and they're filling and then they're going to drain anyway i'm pretty excited so i hope you liked it i hope you enjoyed the video and the process um like subscribe hit that little notification bell you know i've had a lot of fun doing this the hardest part was actually filming it rather than and then editing it to come rather than putting it all together so i hope you enjoyed it and check us out [Music] you

Channel: IntoHomesteading

Views: 313,458

Keywords: Dutch bucket system, How to build Dutch bucket system, Dutch bucket hydroponic system, how to build hydroponic system, harbor freight greenhouse, greenhouse, greenhouse hydroponics, 10x12 greenhouse, deep water system, deep water hydroponic system, weed hydroponics, hydroponic set up, how to set up hydroponic system, growing weed, marijuana hydroponic system, step by step hydroponic set up, easy hydroponics, tomatoes hydroponic, vegetable hydroponics, growhouse

Id: -vp8Udr7cWo

Length: 32min 9sec (1929 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020