Self Watering Plant Pots
A self watering plant pot seems complicated at first glance, but is actually rather simple. It consists of a pot for a plant to be buried in, and a water reservoir. A small cord is run between the two compartments. A capillary motion pulls the water up through the cords and keeps the soil damp. When the water in the soil is used by the plant, it is replaced by more water pulled up from the reservoir.
I was inspired to design my own self watering plant pots, after watching a youtube video by Evan and Katelyn where they made a self watering plant pot from concrete.
I made both compartments for my plant pot on my Ender 3. I printed the water reservoir using normal settings for my printer. The plant compartment was printed using vase mode with a 0.4mm nozzle. For reasons explained later, neither of these were optimal.
For the cords, I used small pieces of paracord I had from a previous project. After some testing, the cords proved to work well at inducing a capillary motion.
Initially, I had designed the prints rather small. They could only fit a small succulent. Unfortunately, this size was rather useless, as succulents will drown from the constant water of a self watering plant pot.
I redesigned the plant pot to be bigger. I then reprinted them using the same settings as before.
When I pulled the plant compartment off the printer, I knew immediately that it was not to my liking. It was very flimsy and the layer lines had partially separated in some places. Additionally, the water reservoir took a long time to print and used a lot of material. Regardless, I proceeded so that I could test how well it worked. And it worked well. The plant remained well watered. The plant pot was somewhat stiffer after a plant was buried inside, but it was still fragile.
The reservoir was hard to fill because you could not see the water line. I flooded the area around the pot multiple times while trying to refill it. I needed time to think of how to improve the design, so I took a break from the project.
I came back to the project a few months later when I saw a video by CNC kitchen about using Raise 3D’s Ideamaker to “texture” prints. Using this technique improved the rigidity of the prints. To further stiffen the pots, I used a 1mm nozzle with 0.6mm layer height.
With these combined, I was able to make both compartments using vase mode. Vase mode reduced the material used in the reservoir and made the whole project print faster and have better overall strength. This turned out to be the perfect combination.
