I own 20 ZipGrow towers and have become quite disillusioned with them across 3 growing seasons.
The biggest problem is that there is nothing to buffer moisture on the roots if there is an intermittent problem.
You might get a nice crop of basil growing and then a clogged emitter for 12 hours can be the death of those plants.
Here are all of the failure modes I have experienced:
- pump dying
- Leak in base causing all water gone in 24 hours
- clogged emitters
- water choosing off route through tower and not hitting the plants on top
- emitters getting blown off causing water to spray outside tower
- circuit breakers trip from pump
Overall I’ve probably lost half of everything I’ve planted in a zipgrow.
A professional operation with a daily maintenance routine could probably use them, but they are no panacea.
It's worth mentioning that the facebook forums for hydroponics farming are full of people trying to sell these things second hand with no explanation 'why'.
People have been making flood and drain systems for years, controlled by a super-reliable mechanical system. The downside is that these are typically much larger and heavier. The ones I've seen have a bed of gravel as the grow medium. It also has many gallons of water in the system, and no doubt that evaporation is more of a concern.
Wouldn't something like Minecraft Vertical Farms be more effective, specially because you could just have a basin a top of another basin, and have the water drip from the top one to the ones below, thus requiring only one pump to pump the water that collects at the very bottom back up to the top. Of course, having aditional pump to add more water to the system would be helpful but not necessary. The only problem that I've faced with such a design is the amount of mass that all together would have and the required flood strength to support such a weight. That being said, having smaller such systems for room like enviroments shouldn't have many problems.
I want to get my feet wet with hydroponics because my daughter loves fresh produce and I love the idea growing her favorite fruits and veggies. Do you now how Zipgrow compares to Aerogarden (the "farm" size one).
The Aerogarden Farm and ZipGrow 2-Tower setup are fairly close in price (About $600 USD). Beyond that they're fairly different. The ZipGrow is certainly targeting a more prosumer/commercial demographic where as the Aerogarden, even the farm, tops out at high-end prosumer.
If you're an average person who isn't interested in dedicating their life to hydroponics, the Aerogarden is going to be the safer bet. It's small-ish, it's simple, it has a nice touch screen and beeps reminders at you.
Ok but the selling point generally seems to involve how you will have fresh vegetables/fruits year round, or in a place where you cannot have your own garden. So you are saying that the selling point these products always make is false, I think that requires some citation/argument as to why it should be so - not just a flat statement.
> I think that requires some citation/argument as to why it should be so - not just a flat statement.
Just plant a tomato in a pot, put it by the window and wait. I could find you citation about the "freshness" of your garden products, but nothing beat experiencing it for yourself.
Hydroponics and LEDs are good for mass-producing a bit of basil and a lot of tomatoes, but the taste is just not there. They're bland, and unsavory.
The "food" you give to the plants is in the water, including oxygen. They get everything they need from it, the taste is identical, and I have no doubt that a double-blind study would show that if it hasn't already. There is no "magic" inside soil other than its a media that happens to allow nutrients to exist next to the roots that absorb them, while allowing the plant to support its own weight and stay fixed.
You can grow using media such as sand, rocks, water, air, sponge, even packing peanuts. And in terms of fertilizer, it's the same as traditional farming except they have to be water-soluble. I spent a lot of time researching hydroponics, and once you peel back the layers, it really is simple with no magic involved.
Edit. Obviously this might be different for root vegetables like potatoes (they don't do well sitting in water). Though I've seen some articles with NASA attempting them with some luck in soil-less media.
Identical to what? Strawberries grown in boron deficient soil taste worse than strawberries grown in soil with adequate boron. There is no yield difference, the plant does not die from the low boron. But it is unable to make large enough quantities of certain flavonoids that contribute to the flavor of the berries. We do not know how to synthetically feed plants in hydroponic situations well enough to even get optimal yield, much less optimal flavor or nutrition. Maximum yields from healthy soil still exceed maximum yields from synthetic fertilization.
>There is no "magic" inside soil other than its a media that happens to allow nutrients to exist next to the roots that absorb them, while allowing the plant to support its own weight and stay fixed.
That is a really unfortunate misconception. The difference is very real, but it is science not magic. Soil is not an inert media, it is a massive and complex ecosystem with an entire food web. Fungi actually penetrate the roots of plants and directly exchange nutrients and energy with them. Microbes can create entire amino acids, and directly give them to plants in exchange for glucose. This is very different from an inert medium that simply holds ions in water for plants to absorb. Hormones released by the plant roots appear to change the organic acid production of certain fungi, which affects how much of which minerals are solublized from the mineral component of the soil (dirt). Millions of years of co-evolution have created a system where plants are able to direct microbes to meet their specific nutritional needs at any particular time. In the process, these microbes defend the plants they have formed these symbiotic relationships with from other microbes, such as those that cause fungal diseases like blight.
>it's the same as traditional farming except they have to be water-soluble
They have to be water-soluble with conventional farming too. This is the big problem with conventional agriculture, it is really just industrial scale hydroponics done using the ground as a cheap medium. Traditional farming predates synthetic fertilizer and relied on soil.
I should clarify that the problems I experience are probably not specific to ZipGrow, but would happen to any vertical hydroponics that require functioning system to keep roots damp.
I worked for the company that developed the technology. Personally not much of a green-thumb myself, but it's great to see how much you can grow with vertical towers, either in a greenhouse or indoors with LED lights. You can grow about 3-4x what you would get with a flat grow bed for many plants [1]. While the towers are great, the real trick is the grow media as you want it robust enough to survive while not suffocating the roots.
For those interested in starting your own farm or just gardening I'd highly recommend "UpStart Farmers" [2]. A friend of mine help's moderate it and is really focused on helping people learn vertical farming and aquaponics. They have an enormous selection of content regarding various aspects such as nutrient mixes, dealing with pests, etc. The community is also active and helpful to each other.
FYI: This is from the Canadian licensee's of the original Bright Agrotech that was acquired by Plenty Ag [3]. I'm bullish that indoor farming will be a big boon in providing more localized and therefore fresh and nutritional vegetables and leafy greens for much of the world's population. The economics are slowly improving with LED efficiency increases and capital infusion to scale farms.
I thought the technology looked familiar. I had been following the Bright Agrotech people on YouTube for a while, they produced great content for those interested in indoor hydroponics for the home grower.
Do you know what happened to the company? Did they go bankrupt and have to liquidate their IP?
Sibling is correct. Plenty Ag acquired Bright Agrotech for people and IP. Bright was profitable but faced a difficult time scaling. It’s business model depended on individuals getting enough capital to start a farm. Many farms were profitable, but not all, and it’s difficult finding lots of people wanting to take out loans to start farms and banks didn’t understand the idea of indoor farms. Plenty Ag raised $200 million (largely from SoftBank) and needed to get a jumpstart on working tech and experts in the field. I’m still hopeful that once indoor farming tech keeps improving (based partly on large investment in the Plenty’s of the world) and banks accept indoor farms that individuals will be able to easily run indoor farms. A big part of that would be more labor automation. Plus if an asteroid ever hits Earth knowing how to grow indoor food would be valuable. ;) More realistically (hopefully!) indoor farming will be critical for colonizing Mars or asteroids. Long term, indoor farming and vertical farming will be critical technology for humanity to perfect, IMHO. An example (and fun) tech innovation was Bright’s invention of “water cooled LED towers”. That’s an early “Google style” innovation akin to using trays of cheap servers. Regardless hardware innovation takes massive amounts of capital. I’m hoping the Plenty Ag people are able to make fresh produce “a thing”! Edit: link to water cooled led’s https://info.brightagrotech.com/hubfs/Downloadable_Guides/Co...
Do you have any idea, why do people concentrate on aquaponics, not aeroponics? Is it just simply easier to implement, or better researched? Or is it actually better (higher yield, closed-loop system, ...)?
Sibling is correct. Aquaponics is a (partially) closed loop system where fish provide nitrogen for the roots, and the plants clean the water for the fish. You still need to feed the fish and sometimes balance the water pH.
I've experimented with both. Aeroponics is a LOT more complicated- you really need a high-pressure system if you want good results (fogponics with an ultrasonic humidifier doesn't work well enough). And a high pressure system has to worry about clogs in the nozzles, and it has more moving parts, and some of those parts need to be well sealed.... vs. hydroponics which can be as complicated as turning on and off an aquarium pump.
I don't really understand the whole "urban agriculture" crowd.
People do often live in crowded cities, but there's plenty of space to grow stuff on outside of cities. It's the same kind of thinking that gave us the solad roads (which were, predictably, a catastrophic failure).
Urban farming only makes sense for high value, easily perishable produce. Fresh herbs, leafy greens, tomatoes, and other salad ingredients can be produced with higher quality when they are harvested and used on the same day, and when the plants don't have to be bred for shipment-and-storage durability. The real benefit is superior flavor and texture for quality-focused, price-insensitive eaters.
Note that this product site touts how much lettuce the system can grow.
More radical claims about how vertical farms will reduce CO2 emissions or feed a growing world population are aspirational to the point of delusion. Vertical farming isn't going to replace the calories that people get from potatoes and beans grown in big plots of dirt outdoors. If you ate potatoes grown in a nearby vertical farm instead of ones grown in Idaho and shipped across the country, you'd actually be increasing your carbon footprint.
It takes only a little energy to move a potato a thousand miles cross-country. It takes a lot of energy to grow a potato under artificial light. Even though renewable energy is ~20x better in life cycle emissions than fossil energy, it takes more than 20x as much energy to grow potatoes under artificial light. From a CO2 life cycle perspective you're better off eating potatoes that had ordinary diesel powered tractors, trains, and trucks involved in their production and delivery than to eat potatoes that were grown in a wind-powered vertical farm next door to you.
It would be helpful to quantify "plenty dense" here. Paris has a population density of 21498/km2. Turning that around, that's roughly 46 square meters per person. That doesn't leave a whole lot of space for a potato plot if you're supposed to cook and eat those potatoes somewhere, too.
AFAIK traditional artificial light sources do indeed dissipate much more energy for the same amount of 'useful light', and also produce so much heat that they cannot be placed near the plant.
Is artificial light mandatory in urban farming? Aren't some (non fiber-optics-based) "light tubes" able to transmit light along with the necessary UV?
Artificial light isn't necessary, but it's more space efficient and allows you to grow more plants per area which helps with the typically high land cost per square foot in urban areas.
These arguments are often lost shen people believe in something blindly. Tomato grown in Spain and flown to England will end up costing our earth less than the smae tomato grown in England because of additional energy to keep it worm required.
Food production in US is increasingly consolidated into hands of large agriculture corporations. Why not decentralize, make the system more robust to shock (look what's happening with grocery stores today)?
I entirely agree, this would be great. I don't see why it has to be done in cities though. Farmers in smaller co-ops can provide a similar decentralisation.
The grocery stores are low on stock because of selfish people panic buying, not because there's not enough food. The supply chain is still functioning normally.
The supply chain is functioning normally, but "normal" means ~40% of food consumption in urban areas occurs via restaurants. The supply chain isn't designed for 100% of folks buying groceries at the supermarket and preparing their own food.
And that's sort of the problem. The normal centralised supply chain optimises for normal usage patterns, and adapting to abnormal usage patterns causes widespread issues in the short term.
A decentralised supply chain is (at least in theory) better able to adapt to local distrubances.
How do you imagine a de-centralized supply system, with each urban area's cell optimized for 40% of produce going to restaurants, would respond differently?
You're absolutely right. De-centralized systems can definitely respond better to local disturbances. Conversely, they're sometimes more vulnerable to larger scale disturbances that can more easily overwhelm the capacity of smaller systems to absorb shocks.
The system looks pretty damn robust given that we've just shut the global economy down and the food still keeps coming in. Maybe with some hiccups but that's complaining at a high level.
The reason decentralization doesn't make a lot of sense is because we need to produce food cheap and at scale to feed the world. Putting thousands of dollars into vertical farming equipment that doesn't fit into the apartments of most people on the planet is kind of silly.
There's also simply division of labour at work here. It's uneconomical for large portions of the population to spend their time farming.
It's essentially just a recreational hobby for wealthy people or maybe reasonable on a Mars Colony, but here it does not make much sense.
True, but it is very nice especially in the winter to have bright lights and green plants in your living space. That alone is worth it for me, having something to eat along the way is just a bonus.
If (a really big IF) solar panels can get efficient enough while LEDs also become more efficient, in theory plants grown indoors being fed by LEDs attuned to the precise portions of the spectrum they need with the whole thing powered by the solar panels, you could get a better yield than outdoor growing. Figure out cost effective fusion, things get even better. But neither is the case right now.
As far as the urban agriculture crowd goes, they're concerned about the length of their logistics lines to their tables. Raspberries grown half a mile down the street in winter is better for the environment than flying them in from another hemisphere... provided you get the energy costs of the indoor farming system low enough.
Until you genetically engineer a more efficient plant and your back to a net loss even assuming absolutely free panels and LED’s etc.
Vertical farming only really works as either artistic preference for maximum visual appeal or the kind of science fiction where you assume only a small handful of technology advanced.
If you can genetically engineer a more efficient plant for growing in a field, you can genetically engineer a plant that's more efficient to grow under LEDs, no? I don't see how a hypothetical breakthrough in generic engineering makes vertical farming a mad fantasy. There are certain crops that can't be grown in high yield monocultures and have to be transported from other parts of the world. I'm sure there are many cases where the math works, and I don't think most people are talking about growing corn indoors when they talk about vertical farming.
If a genetically engineered plant gathered energy equally across the full spectrum then frequency shifting using solar > LED is absolutely pointless even at 100% efficiency. Solar panels and leaves are solving the same problem using the same physical laws.
But that’s hardly required as solar panels to LED’s can’t reach 100% efficiency. Further, the limited lifespan of solar panels and LED’s means you need to cover their construction etc which requires resources.
Ultimately, looking at theoretical limits it’s simply a net loss.
PS: Monoculture is far from required, it’s an outgrowth of current automation rather than having any theoretical advantage.
There is no need to breed plants specifically for LED lights. All the newest and most efficient and cost effective LEDs are white spectrum now and emulate the sun far closer than any other light ever has. What matters is how efficiently can you make the lights run, and right now it is pretty damn good getting about 200 lumens per watts on those grow LEDs (versus about half that for a shitty standard household LED)
Isn't it counterproductive to waste LEDs optimized for our perception to plant growth which doesn't fully utilize the spectrum of sunlight? I thought that is WHY grow lights have this purple sheen, be it traditional flourescent ones, or contemporary LEDs, or a mix of red and blue ones.
Despite the 'common knowledge', plants do utilize most of the visible light spectrum, even green, just in different amounts. And on top of that these white LEDs aren't just a single static white, their light spectrum are tuned to specific growth spectrum and can be ordered however you want, but all come out visibly to us as white of slightly different shades.
Those blurple lights are just awful, and not only do the LEDs have far less energy efficiency being old tech, but their supposed "optimal" wavelengths are anything but. They are blasting out extremely narrow wavelengths of light and trying to make it more continuous by using a bunch of slightly different narrow range colors, but it doesn't work as well as one would hope, especially when they are coming from different point sources.
> As far as the urban agriculture crowd goes, they're concerned about the length of their logistics lines to their tables. Raspberries grown half a mile down the street in winter is better for the environment than flying them in from another hemisphere.
Aside from environmental effects, it’s also just a more secure logistics chain. A person needs water, food, and shelter to survive. Sometimes it feels strange to me that the trend of the past centuries has been to increase the distance between a person and those sources — to introduce more points of failure between you and the things you need in order to survive.
Another commenter mentioned it's more energy efficient to grow tomatoes in Spain - where less heat is needed - and fly them to the UK. That may be true, but an even better way is to just grow crops that are suitable for that season.
In the UK you can grow crops all year round outdoors [0], and the growing seasons could easily be extended with a passive greenhouse (polycarbonate is more insulating than glass). You can also use tried and tested preservation techniques like canning and fermenting to keep food for other seasons.
Unless you do pull out fusion, you will always have too huge loss between solar panels and LEDs. As efficient as LEDs are now, and I know because I just built 1200 watts of the latest and most efficient LEDs that are available, they are nowhere near cost effective in comparison tot he sun. Plants are not nearly as inefficient as people believe, especially when you consider the fact that solar panels themselves can also only absorb a small fraction of the light spectrum.
That 1200 watts is only really covering a 6 by 6 foot square worth of growth area at about 35 watts a square foot at 200 lumens per watts. It could be slightly larger but only if you want most plants to grow extremely slow or be really weak, and you can go up to 50 watts per square foot before requiring supplemental CO2 but not all plants like that amount of light.
Converting that to 1 acre worth of coverage, which is what is about what is needed to feed a single human for one year, you are looking at about 1,500,000 watts running 12-18 hours per day. That is a ridiculous amount of energy. Even assuming you can get away with 1/3 of that area by super careful and efficient growth year round that is still a half million watts in lighting costs alone. Not to mention all the other work and costs.
I don't see indoor farms being good for anything other than extreme specialty plants or extremely fragile plants until we can pull essentially limitless energy out for far cheaper than we can get even with fossil fuels.
I am curious about the 36 sqft (3.34 square meter) and 1200 watt. As we end up with considerably less watt per area. We use about 100 watt per square meter. You have about 360 watt per square meter. So we use less than a third. Preliminary tests show very good growth rates. We will have better data in a few months.
This is for an indoor leafy green, mostly sallad, aquaponics growing facility.
Technically I can still get growth down to 11-12 watts, closer to your levels, but it is definitely much slower growth and it won't be enough later on. Technically I run about 20 watts during the initial vegetative state, but once plants start flowering or fruiting there is a markedly different end result if I don't turn the lights up to around 35 watts a square foot, which is what most other people ive seen report. I mostly just run it at 35 all the time because I want them fruiting and producing as much as they can as fast as possible. But if you are growing leafy greens your plants are never even entering the flowering stage because you will be picking it by then.
Perhaps with a bigger more automated setup I could do slower growth, but there are other costs like ventilation or dehumidification or possibly heating or cooling too that don't really change a lot whether the plants are growing fast or slow, which makes faster growth possible optimal financially, even if I might be losing out a few percentage worth of light absorption.
I think I read an article at one point that most "urban agriculture" and indoor farming tools were originally funded with the expectation that they would only be valuable for cannabis production. Because while you could grow tomatoes and lettuce indoors if you wanted to, it's really only economical to produce cannabis. I think that's still true today.
This is true to an extent, but I certainly wouldn't say it's the case for most. From my observation working in the field it was really only a thing between 2013-2015.
First, it's independence from the industrial farming infrastructure of the USA and knowing what fertilizers went into your food or medicine. Produce sold in your local store are the 'industrial' versions which are genetically bred for transport, storage and presentation over taste.
Second, it's climate change which is making outdoor farming more and more difficult by the year, as well as a push towards higher efficiency. Also, having a garden (or being around nature, things growing) has been clinically shown to reduce stress in humans.
Third, it's MUCH less climate impact to transport renewably sourced electrons over a regional grid than it is to transport decaying produce in cold storage to a grocery store. Free sunlight is still cheap, but creates dependence on the seasonality (frequency, duration) which means a variety of crops are totally non-viable in certain hemispheres. Full outdoor growing has a much higher level of exposure to pests, requiring pesticides -- whereas indoor growing under lights gives you a higher level of defensibly without that risk.
It appeals to me. Even if the cost was higher, building the capability locally seems very valuable. As well, not all costs are monetary. If the pollution is lower (e.g. from eliminating transportation) it may be worth paying the higher price.
Another appeal is knowing exactly what goes into your food.
Most of the pollution from food production comes from actually producing the food. Things like tractors and stuff use a lot of fuel.
Furthermore, putting farms in urban buildings means that some urban businesses or residences will ha e to be moved further out, increasing pollution. In reality, this would move the pollution to the urban areas, and not reduce it.
Lastly, I can’t think of a reason that you’d know more about farming practices if it happens in an urban environment than in a rural environment
No, most of the pollution from food production is from fertilizer. Nearly all commercial fertilizer sold is artificially derived from fossil fuels and pollutes just as bad as burning it. Over 60% of the world's total crop yield is the direct result of fossil fuel-derived fertilizer. Removing the fossil-fuel component would make fertilizer production alone rival the current total energy demands of the entire world on that single task.
Tractors are moving tens of thousands of pounds of material at a time and are extremely efficient for the energy they utilize. Tractors may seem like they are using ass tons of fuel from looks alone, people see the huge engine and big cab and chunks of large steel and think it just eats fuel to produce crazy tons of power, but many consumer cars have more horsepower than tractors and frivolously spend fuel on saving mere seconds in both acceleration and braking which are huge wastes. Tractors don't accelerate for long periods of time or waste tons of energy braking all the time just for personal convenience. Tractors are just geared down super low and built ultra-robust with zero concern for physical size. The run better and more efficient than car motors specifically because they didn't have to make any trade offs for compactness, weight, or engine and transmission form. How many cars have turbos and super-chargers? How many of them are tuned for fuel efficiency rather than peak performance? Tractors commonly have them for the sole purpose of fuel efficiency, they never lacked power in the first place because of the lack of other restraints.
The point about displacing people and businesses is only true if real estate is in a fixed quantity. When building is a possibility this is not a zero sum game.
Given the (OP) solution, I was imagining having a broccoli wall in my apartment. This would give me a lot more insight into the farming practices as I would be growing it. Also, near zero transportation externalities.
Perhaps if the externalized costs of the pollution were more efficiently passed on to the consumer then the benefits of localized urban aquaponics might be enhanced.
Look at the Netherlands. They have no land and one of the largest agricultural producers in the world.
More efficient, cheaper, better for the environment...the benefits are pretty much endless. It isn't about "urban" but using what we have more efficiently.
>They have no land and one of the largest agricultural producers in the world.
That's a bit of a misconception. Most people get the impression from the headlines that they produce a lot of food, but that is not really the case.
The Netherlands is the world's second largest EXPORTER of "agricultural products", by dollar value. 10% of that is consulting and equipment. Another 10% is flowers. Those are not food. Even in the remaining 80%, it is mainly products that are high in monetary value, but low in land efficiency, like cheese and flavorless hydroponic tomatoes. The Netherlands actually only produces 50% of the calories needs of their population, and exports away a good chunk of that. They rely on importing staples to feed their population.
>More efficient, cheaper, better for the environment
The Netherlands model is none of those things. It is just used as a propaganda tool for a corporate greenwashing campaign to convince people that spending lots of money on environmentally destructive and wasteful technology is good for the environment, when it is actually being done because it is good for the bank accounts of a small minority of wealthy people.
From personal experience, in Virginia and the pacific northwest, you get plenty of berry roads. Roads literally lined with prolific blackberry bushes and sometimes raspberry bushes too. Seriously, these things are weeds. Especially raspberries. They're fucking delicious weeds. During season, plenty of folks park on the side of the road to pick berries. These road berries are better by magnitudes compared to store bought ones.
I have yet to see salad roads, but would love to see it. Diversity is "weed" edibles would be awesome.
Depending on the traffic loads of the roads i'd be wary of eating them for 'organic' reasons. The same goes for the embankments of railroads which are sprayed with herbicides, at least where i am.
The economical value of growing veggies after paying city rents/wages/ and infra investment doesn't paint a good picture profit wise. The food business is mostly based on low wages paid to immigrant employees. It works because usually these people live in rural areas. Look at the milk price. I haven't seen it increase in 5 years..
I think the goal here is going distributed so that by moving the end produce closer to you, you save on packaging, logistics, and other expenses. Plus growing something gives you joy.
Doing that in schools teaches kids about farming, about food, and how it gets on their table. I'm doing the same at home to teach my children the same.
Also in the times of the crisis you reduce the pressure to producers and shops by consuming your own instead of going to the shop.
Having built a system in my basement to grow basil, spinach, and lettuce, there's a whole lot more to it than $25 in plastic.
First, you should use food grade plastic, then there are lights, a pump, shelving, growing medium, fertilizer, ph adjustment, extension cords, timers, cups, air tubing, and air stone, and a bunch of other stuff.
Then you have to get it all home, double and triple check you are doing it correctly.
I don't think I spent $500, but no way anyone can put together an equivalent system for $25. Like most things, there's a lot more complexity than people realize.
Every time one of these vertical/rotating indoor farms comes onto the market (usually via crowdfunding), it has roughly the same level of cost inflation. Haven't quite figured out who they are conning into buying these setups.
I have a way overpriced aerogarden farm and for me it's really just decor along the lines of having an aquarium. It certainly doesn't yield enough of anything to be worth the price. I contemplated something DIY but I didn't think I could get the clean aesthetics. I have a 3d printer now so I could probably make something that looks less like a hack now.
I think he got a lot of flack for pointing out that the zip-grow towers are way overpriced and you can DIY them yourself reasonably well. There really isn't anything too-complicated about the ZipGrow towers, other than that they use a sponge as a media.
This is reminiscent of the people who ask, "Why would anyone buy a pre-loaded Linux laptop, Dell's Developer Editions, when you can already install it on an older Thinkpad?"
Service, support, ease of use and setup, and, in the case of something that might be visible in a readily trafficked area, aesthetics.
If those things are not valuable to you (and they may not be) then you are not the target audience.
The biggest problem is that there is nothing to buffer moisture on the roots if there is an intermittent problem.
You might get a nice crop of basil growing and then a clogged emitter for 12 hours can be the death of those plants.
Here are all of the failure modes I have experienced:
- pump dying - Leak in base causing all water gone in 24 hours - clogged emitters - water choosing off route through tower and not hitting the plants on top - emitters getting blown off causing water to spray outside tower - circuit breakers trip from pump
Overall I’ve probably lost half of everything I’ve planted in a zipgrow.
A professional operation with a daily maintenance routine could probably use them, but they are no panacea.