Love the idea, might try it at home. But speaking as someone who has run both hydroponic and aeroponic systems successfully (as a hobby) - I'm envisioning a lot of dead plants in 6-12 months time and a maintenance nightmare.
Various issues:
Cleaning - Algae and diseases can quickly kill every connected plant in a hydroponic system. You also need to know how to heal a plant in this situation. Probably the easiest option is just to ditch every plant in the desk, clean, then start again.
Nutrient level maintenance - you now need an employee whose job it is to ensure correct nutrient balance, it's trickier than just adding water!
General part maintenance - more tricky with aeroponics than hydroponics, but various parts of the system quickly get clogged and caulked up (pumps, nozzles, etc). I was replacing a nozzle every 4 weeks on a relatively small 12 nozzle spraying system.
I don't really know about the nutrient balance without looking it up, but it's always trickier with multiple different types of plant in a single system. If you have a single plant system, you can just replace the nutrient solution every other week, like for like. If you have different types of plant growing together, you need to be a bit more careful with monitoring your NPK levels.
Then there's the basic maintenance that you'd have to do, regardless of plant type. Like rinsing the nutrient residue from the substrate every couple of weeks to prevent toxic buildup. Not particularly difficult, just drain the solution, pour water over the substrate to rinse, then add new solution.
But it's a new office maintenance task that would have to be done, and I can imagine things getting forgotten/skipped. If you like the idea of taking care of your own desk, then it's not particularly difficult. I'd be more worried in a medium office filled with these though; a small office is easy to take care of a desk or two, and a large office can afford to have a dedicated maintenance job, but a medium office is likely to be stuck with an awkward workload.
Comments
Love the idea, might try it at home. But speaking as someone who has run both hydroponic and aeroponic systems successfully (as a hobby) - I'm envisioning a lot of dead plants in 6-12 months time and a maintenance nightmare.
Various issues:
Cleaning - Algae and diseases can quickly kill every connected plant in a hydroponic system. You also need to know how to heal a plant in this situation. Probably the easiest option is just to ditch every plant in the desk, clean, then start again.
Nutrient level maintenance - you now need an employee whose job it is to ensure correct nutrient balance, it's trickier than just adding water!
General part maintenance - more tricky with aeroponics than hydroponics, but various parts of the system quickly get clogged and caulked up (pumps, nozzles, etc). I was replacing a nozzle every 4 weeks on a relatively small 12 nozzle spraying system.
Would succulents be easier to maintain?
I don't really know about the nutrient balance without looking it up, but it's always trickier with multiple different types of plant in a single system. If you have a single plant system, you can just replace the nutrient solution every other week, like for like. If you have different types of plant growing together, you need to be a bit more careful with monitoring your NPK levels.
Then there's the basic maintenance that you'd have to do, regardless of plant type. Like rinsing the nutrient residue from the substrate every couple of weeks to prevent toxic buildup. Not particularly difficult, just drain the solution, pour water over the substrate to rinse, then add new solution.
But it's a new office maintenance task that would have to be done, and I can imagine things getting forgotten/skipped. If you like the idea of taking care of your own desk, then it's not particularly difficult. I'd be more worried in a medium office filled with these though; a small office is easy to take care of a desk or two, and a large office can afford to have a dedicated maintenance job, but a medium office is likely to be stuck with an awkward workload.
It wouldn't take much to design a two part tray that would me the maintenance much easier.
Thanks for the great response!
"As a hobby"... are we talking about a certain plant in particular?
Most likely tomatoes.
Yep, tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, chillies, etc... No weed I'm afraid!