Help! I invested $8000 in a residential Urban Cultivator — and it doesn’t work.
That’s exactly what happened to me. My machine was seven years old but I got in touch with customer support and they didn’t have any of the parts in stock. My options were to either toss the machine away or open it up and hack into it, and I chose the latter. The Urban Cultivator is a great piece of hardware so it would really be a shame for it to go to waste. Given how expensive the appliance is — and the fact mine went inoperative — I would advise you to do thorough research and consideration before purchasing the machine to see if it is a worthwhile investment for you.
Today, I will go over everything I did to repair and salvage my Urban Cultivator. The ideas in this post are to be used as guidelines.
⚠️ CAUTION Any time you work with electrical wiring, it's paramount that you consult a professional if you are puzzled or unsure about something. It's always better to be safe than sorry. I asked my electrician friend for help beforehand and it made it super easy to get things done.
1. Opening up the machine
The Cultivator is rather easy to open up, with standard screws holding the machine in place on the backside of the appliance. On the three other faces, you will see that everything you need is easily accessible.
2. Bypassing electrical controls
💡 For the lights
I was lucky as I had my electrician friend come in and do this part for me. It is super simple but it was nice to have a professional look over things and ensure the procedures were done correctly. We bypassed all the wiring and hooked lights up to its own driver and then plugged it into the wall.
💨 For the fans
This was an easy workaround. I left the fans on all the time so there is constant air circulation. The big thing was that we needed a driver to lower the voltage. If this is not done, fans will blow with too much power. And thankfully, I had some extra drivers lying around. If you don’t want to buy a new one, for the sake of your wallet and the planet, I’d recommend purchasing a used driver on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist.
3. Revamping the watering system
Since we were not getting the water from our plumbing system, we had to recycle the water: this meant getting a pump that could pump the water to the highest level with even pressure among all the levels.
🚰 How do I select the right water pump?
First, you need to know the height and the thickness of the hose you want to pump. Most pumps have a graph on the side of the packaging that illustrates the height that the pump will push and the thickness it can lift. I would recommend that you get the one that is greater than what you need. This makes sure that your pump will always be able to pump to the highest level over time.
🚰 Installing the new pump
To have the water go up, I fitted the new watering hose where the old hose was. For each level, I put adjustable valves so I could control the water pressure. I also put silicone where the water enters the unit, and this is important for when the water drains down, as some of the water would catch and leak out on the ground.
I would run the pump and time it to see how long it would take to fill up the trays. This is important to know and test this duration because you want to ensure that your trays are getting even watering. We ran into trouble of both over- and under-watering. It took some time to dial it in.
🚰 Automating the watering
I got purchased a timer from Amazon to help automate this process to make my life easier. It is important to get a digital timer for this as the analog timers are in 15-minute increments. The digital ones allow you to do one min increments.
I set it so the Cultivator was watered every morning before the lights come on and I would end up hand watering if needed in the afternoon. The reason for this is that the microgreens would be at different stages of growth in the unit.
4. Replacing the grow lights
The unit we had used T5 LED grow lights and they lose their strength after a year of use. This machine was over seven years old so long overdue to replace the lights. The main issue with these lights is that they are not in a standard size. I reached out to the company for replacement lights as I was not able to find any online.
You can really notice the difference when you change the lights. The shoots open up sooner and the leaves have a darker green pigment.
