Apponix Vertical Barrel

• The aponix barrels do not come with independent single pumps or reservoirs per unit. This is nice and convenient if you intend to run a few of them and don’t want to get involved in actually thinking about efficient production processes also including cleaning, storing, washing areas etc to set up a fully fledged urban micro farm. Having to maintain many small pumps and reservoirs and care for proper cleaning of every part becomes a maintenance nightmare if you would like to run hundreds or many thousands of grow spaces and maintain a plannable and reliable production. At best you engage a professional turn-key facility planning expert to help you set things up properly. We can also help you in this process. This is very different if you talk to one of these multi-level-marketing sales people targeting hobby users and beginners and ask them detailed questions about hydroponics or horticulture. 

• The aponix vertical barrel is set up of basically ‘one’ simple lego-like part instead of many differently shaped non-intuitive parts of different materials, that are tedious to assemble and clean. Again, if you have a few ‘towers’, that might be feasible. But running many of them, you will have to take care of all the small parts. It makes your operations unnecessarily complicated and wastes your time and resources. Take a look at youtube and check out assembly videos of the system you intend to buy, you get an idea this way if you would like to do all this assembling over and over again when you need to clean and sterilize that piece.  

• Once you have set up the barrel ring segments, that consist of 6 1/6th-parts, the ring segments stay assembled during maintenance and cleaning procedures.  

• Cleaning process: One cycle includes harvest, unstack ring segments, power-wash, re-stack and replant. If you have seedlings ready for harvesting a barrel, you do not lose time. Cleaning an aponix barrel if well organized takes 10min. You could also save the steps of unstacking a barrel by opening the top lid, leaving the barrel open on the top and clean the inside with a high-pressure torch from the top. During this, you obviously need to divert the drainage from your nutrient circulation into a simple bucket or sink.

Irrigation: 

• There are a few options to ensure irrigation of the barrels. Irrigation is always attached to the top lid. The ideal flow rate is 1-2 liters per minute.

The following methods of irrigation have been tested and can be provided by aponix.eu:

• Using an inverted sprinkler operation from a pressure of 1.5+bar droplets are distributed evenly around the inside walls of the barrel. The Version 2.0. 1/6 part has an inner wing structure to then distribute the liquid flowing down the inside to each root zone of your plants.
  The flow rate of this standard irrigation method is 2 liters per minute.

• Using a spray nozzle operating at a pressure of 2+bar. These spray nozzles are self-cleaning for smaller particles and spray a hollow cone shape of 120 degrees from the top lid – basically the same shape as the top lid itself, filling your barrel up with a drizzle of fine droplets.

• The flow rate of this more aeroponic irrigation method is 1.5 liters per minute.

• Since the concept of the barrel is just to provide a flexible corpus to grow plants at high density, you could well integrate your own irrigation idea! Lids and stands can be drilled for the integration of the above 2 irrigation options. But you can also integrate your own – like fogging or anything else that might suit your crop. Aponix.eu can also send you the parts without pre-drilled holes for testing purposes.