Easy Maintenance
They may be expensive to purchase, but aeroponics systems, in general, are relatively easy to maintain. Your primary chore will be to keep the root chamber disinfected since the constant moisture and high humidity within the chamber promotes bacterial growth. However, since aeroponics don’t use any type of growing media, the small crevices where bacteria can get a start or lurk, shielded from cleaning efforts, are nonexistent. Simple, regular disinfecting should keep bacteria from becoming a problem. Periodically, you’ll also need to disinfect the reservoir and irrigation channels. Fortunately, all of these chores are simple and easy to complete and require only simple chemicals - not much different than cleaning a bathroom.
Disease-Free Production
Cultivating in controlled environments, from greenhouses to hydroponics to aeroponics, part of the benefits is the opportunity to protect plants from pests, disease, and weather extremes, so that plants may grow healthier and faster than soil-grown counterparts. Of course, the degree of control in each individual system can vary significantly. Open-air hydroponics systems can be vulnerable to pests and diseases that many closed greenhouses successfully keep at bay.
In aeroponics systems, the soilless medium prevents problems with several troublesome diseases, but in situations where the aeroponics system is not adequately closed off from the outside, pests and other diseases can still present a threat. Maintaining a carefully controlled environment whenever possible promotes rapid plant growth and development and increases flowering and fruiting, regardless of the plant species or cultivar.
In any aeroponics system, even if a diseased plant manages to sneak into the environment, the setup itself naturally limits transmission. With no growth media and no direct physical contact with the spray valves, plant to plant contact is minimal. This virtually eliminates the opportunity for disease to spread within a crop, and it takes only moments to remove a diseased plant from the tray once the problem is detected, without risk of damaging entangled roots or contacting nearby plants.
When soil, aggregate or other media is used, as in the case of traditional, greenhouse, and many hydroponics setups, disease can quickly spread throughout a shared growth media and infect many plants, if not the entire crop. This is why growth media in hydroponics systems and greenhouses must be sterilized before each new planting, whether you’re using rockwool, peat moss, vermiculite, sand, gravel, or any other media, whether organic or inorganic. In many cases, especially if a disease has cropped up, the growth media is simply replaced. This isn’t a problem in aeroponics systems.
In addition to the lack of direct physical contact between plants, the manner in which nutrient solution is used also minimizes the spread of pathogens between plants. Particularly in High Pressure systems and Ultrasonic Fogger systems, only minimal amounts of nutrient solution are used, most of which is absorbed immediately by the roots. With virtually no unabsorbed liquid to drop off and re-enter the solution collectors, and no possibility of soaking through solid media to affect neighboring plants, pathogen spread is essentially reduced to zero. The small amount of unabsorbed solution can be either treated prior to reuse, or diverted to use on open growth plots and houseplants.
Back Up Systems
Since aeroponics, by definition, suspends plants in mid-air with no growth medium, there is no way to store moisture near the roots in case of a system failure. While the high humidity maintained in the root chamber helps protect roots in the short term, many growers will combine aeroponics with a conventional hydroponics setup to act as an emergency fail-safe mechanism. The backup system provides access to a nutrient solution to help a crop survive until the problem is fixed. Obviously, this isn’t a perfect solution, since roots will not have the same access to oxygen when completely submerged, but if parts are left exposed to air, they can dry and quickly become damaged.
Basic Requirements
- Roots should never be more than slightly damp or overly dry. This may not be possible in LPA setups, since the larger droplet sizes are not as efficiently absorbed by the roots, but in setups where the droplet sizes are 50 microns or less, that shouldn’t be a problem. Maintaining a high humidity in the root chamber will prevent evaporation and excessive drying between misting periods.
- Atomization, where the nutrient solution is reduced to very fine, uniform droplets, not only allows roots to absorb the droplets more quickly and easily, but it means the nutrients contained in the droplets are more efficiently used by plants. Because of this, it’s actually necessary to reduce the nutrient concentration to avoid leaf and root burn. Obviously, this can mean significant savings over hydroponics setups which require relatively large reservoirs of fresh, concentrated nutrient solution to be maintained on hand.
- Feed cycles should be as short as possible in aeroponics, maximizing roots’ exposure time to oxygen. In fact, plants should ideally spend 99.98% of their time exposed directly to air and only 0.02% of their time in contact with the atomized nutrient solution. With these optimized misting periods, nutrient uptake is significantly increased, meaning lateral root growth and root hair development is maximized, which in turn hastens plant growth and fruiting times.
- Since nearly all of the extremely fine droplets in HPA are quickly absorbed by the roots, much smaller volumes and lower concentrations of nutrient solution are necessary. Compared to certain hydroponics systems, nutrient solution is distributed evenly throughout the system. There’s no situation where the plants close to the distribution point absorb the most nutrients, leaving progressively less for plants furthest away, such as in NFT.
