New Hydroponic Desktop Planter - LetPot LPH-Max - First Look

Hello there everybody and welcome back to another video. In this one I'm going to show you something that you probably won't have seen before. You may have seen different versions of them from different manufacturers Currently there's only eight of them available in the world but this particular one... and that's because it's a prototype which is very soon going to go into production. It's an Indiegogo project and I'll put all the links to it in the video description and the pinned comment and I'll explain what it is, who does it, where you can get one, if you do so wish, as the video progresses. Now this thing It may look like a deep fat fryer or an air fryer or something, but it's, according to Let Pot, it's the first four-in-one fully automated growing facility for plants. It's basically a very high-tech hydroponics unit. This thing on the front is a digital display and when I plug it in and show you, you'll be able to see how you can set the various features. But what I'm going to be doing is setting it up how you would when it comes out of the box and basically just leaving it. I'll come back to it in a few weeks and I'll see what the results are. Okay so this container will hold approximately 7.5 litres of water which is a reasonable amount for one of these sorts of units. In fact as far as I know this is the biggest unit available and it'll hold roughly 21 plants depending on how you set them up. So seven and a half litres capacity in here and in gallons that's about two US gallons. We've got a digital display which is Which is also touch screen on the front. And then we've got like a brushed stainless steel finish for the outside of the pot which makes it look quite classy and nice. Here we've got a lid and if I raise it up you'll be able to take a look inside and this goes up quite high. In fact it goes up 19 inches which is about oh I don't know 50 Maybe it's a little bit less than 50 centimetres. Okay then this is what we've got. We've got a little plastic cap which helps to keep the moisture in, helps to keep that thing inside of there moist and then inside of there we've got something known as a growth sponge. When that gets wet it kind of swells out, fills this but you basically just drop your seeds in there, put that inside your pot, put it in the water, stick the top on, program this thing to do its business and walk away and leave it. So as you can see here we've got space for 21 plants and that one is just a fill hole so if you want to manually fill this thing you fill it from there however on the initial fill it'll be a hell of a lot easier if I just lift that off and fill it directly with a watering can. Right, so inside the main reservoir we've got a very technical looking interior and that's because it is quite technical. It's actually got three pumps. One sits in here and that one is used for the automatic top up which I shall show and hopefully demonstrate in a moment. So it pumps water up and drops it back into here to keep it filled up. That one is a general circulation pump. I think it cycles the water around every half an hour or so. just to keep it oxygenated and flowing around here around where the roots are going to be hanging into the water and there's also a pump in here as well that's the exit pipe for it that is where the nutrient solution goes so the nutrient solution automatically gets added at certain times pretty technical stuff and this reasonably small diameter water line goes into the back and that feeds through to that pump for the automatic top up Now the other side of that pipe is meant to go into a container of water like that and then the pump draws the water and keeps this topped up as it needs to. And looking up towards the light we've got all these LEDs here of various colours. We've got white, blue and red and we've got different settings to take advantage of that. Okay so I'll mostly fill this up using my watering can. And then the rest of it will get filled up, hopefully, by the automatic top-up. So I'll be able to test that. Okay, so as far as the nutrients go, we've got part A and part B. Part A has a hell of a lot of stuff in. Nitrogen. Oh, God, what's that? Potassium. No, no, that's potassium. Magnesium. Iron. More magnesium. Copper. Zinc. B. I'm not quite sure. Vitamin B, maybe? Possibly not. And what's that? P-phosphorus... Part B also got Nitrogen, Calcium Oxide and Magnesium Oxide. These particular things, some of them are oxidising agents so they need to be kept separate. But once you fill this with water, give it a shake up, it'll produce a liquid plant food as will that one and then add them both in to here. The top of each of those bottles has got like, almost like a little cap you'd find on a vinegar Just take that out, you'll be able to see, that is, so it's easily dispensable. Now luckily there's a guide on the back of here telling us exactly how much nutrient we need to add to that nutrient pot. Apparently it's about 37 and a half millilitres. Each cap is 15 mil, and it goes, well, 15, 10, 5, so it's very easy to measure out. As you can see, it's slightly coloured because it's got all those nutrients in. And the same amount for part B. Now, there's no mention of adding any extra water to this in the instructions, so I'm just going to close that down and hope it does its thing when it needs to do it. All right, before I put the top back on, I think we'll test out the automatic top-up, so I'll need to switch this fella on. Just peel this protector off so you should be able to see the screen a bit better. Okay, and we turn it on. Okay, it sounds like the circulation pump's going. Yes, it is going. I shall just show you that. It's got a little bubble trapped in the shroud that goes over the top of it. You should be able to see it's on and you'll notice there's a water level indicator here which is flashing. That's telling me there's not enough water in. All right we'll put it into automatic mode by holding that. Oh there we go. That's fair flying out of there. As you can see that's dropping at a rapid rate. That's absolutely filled it. It's drunk the whole bottle. All right that was a close one. I've actually misread the instructions. You just kind of set it away like that when you're filling it from an external source and it draws the water in and it fills it up and then you've got to switch it off yourself. And as far as I can gather, when the water drops to a certain level, that's when it kicks in and feeds it from a different external source. The initial fill is what I've done from an external source. So I've dropped a little bit of water out and it's at the right level now. Okay, let's get the top put back on. All of our empty pots put in. And then we can start dropping some seeds into these little grow foams and then they will go in here and then the little plastic cap will go on just to keep the moisture in. And on the subject of seeds I'm a gardener so I've got quite a lot in here but we'll go for something that's quite leafy and very easy to grow. Now as I've grown all sorts of vegetables hydroponically I know that leafy veg Such as lettuce does very well. I've got numerous different types, so I think that's what we'll be experimenting with here. Ah, the lettuce. I knew it would be the last one that I picked. Unfortunately, I haven't got round to putting labels on these yet, so my filing system isn't good. 50,000 seeds in here. Probably as many as the Svalbard seed bank. Ah, that one looks perfect. Lettuce, mixed heads. So it's basically just a mixture of all sorts of different types of lettuce. That should give us a nice little display in here when they all start to come up, providing there is some like red ones and green ones in here. So into each one of these I'm just going to drop two or three seeds, just to make sure that at least one of them germinates. Three, okay, so now that goes in here and hopefully as it takes on water it'll swell up. I'm going to repeat that process, just dropping a couple of seeds in each one of these, get that loaded up and then I'll get back to you. Right so that's our little pots in, sponges are in the pots, seeds are in the sponges, caps are on on all of them. I'll just drop this light down so it's just over the top of them and then we'll leave it and see what happens. Okay now most people will know that I have a general hatred of phones and I have minimal apps on here. Thank you. I basically use my phone for phone calls and listening to podcasts and very little else. However, I do have an app which is connected to this fella. It's called Smart Life and it should be the only thing that's connected to this because I don't have any other so-called smart devices. I'll turn it on. There we are. Smart Gardening System. Okay, I've just turned all the lights off, apart from the light here. And I'll show you that this app actually does control what happens on here. I'll just change veg and herbs to flower and fruit. Sorry, flower and fruit to veg and herbs. There you go. You should have noticed the change in the light. Yep, put the pump on. You may or may not be able to hear it come on there. It's very quiet. You can alter the light cycles and you can power it on and off as well. It's actually reading a sensor fault there. That's maybe why I was able to fill it too full. As I said, this is a very early pre-production model. The ones that go out will have all the bugs ironed out. And I think the app is also going to be upgraded so you can actually set the light intensity via the app as well. At the minute, it's a little bit limited. It looks nice enough, but I'll just be using the touchscreen. Hopefully, this is now set up for success. As I said before I'm just gonna shut the door and walk away and just leave this. I'll check it in about a week, by then all these seeds should have started to germinate and we should have some progress and I'll just check it periodically just to make sure that it hasn't flooded the place or anything crazy like that. Okay so I do have a few notes about the various features, possibly mentioned them before I may not have done so I thought I'd better run through them The main features are auto adding of water, so hopefully when the water drops down low it will draw it out of this bottle. The bottle is almost full at the present time. Auto adding of nutrients, which it'll do whenever it needs to do it. Auto cycling, that's the little circulation pump that comes on and off. Nine levels of adjustable light, which I definitely showed I showed you there before, and an app which you can control it via. Now the manufacturer's selling price on this, Are you sitting down, is quite a hefty $329, which sounds like a lot, but when you consider how big it is, what features it's got, and how many plants you can grow in it, it actually makes, believe it or not, it makes it better value than some of the other ones out there. But that to me is quite an outlay, considering that I've made hydroponics things basically out of scrap, which have performed very, very well. As previously mentioned, this is an Indiegogo project, so that £329 is, you know, six months down the line. That's how much it'll cost if you just stumbled across it on Amazon or something. Early bird deals reduce the price considerably to £229, which makes it a lot cheaper than the majority of similar sized things out there. And there's a super early bird deal as well which further reduces the price to $199. And that to me still sounds like quite a lot of money but I live in the country. I've got, I don't know, an acre, acre and a half of various land. I've got huge vegetable gardens, you know, I've got land that I could build a huge polytunnel on if I wanted to. If you're living in a town, city, a flat, you know, where you've got limited growing space, something like this could very well work for you. So you're really paying for the convenience of it. And the early bird, sorry, super early bird is $199. That's limited to 200 units. So the first 200 people to take them up on that would get it for $199. Now the pots and the grow foams are a standard thing, so say you've had a couple of harvests and you lose one of the little conical pots or one of the grow foams, you can easily buy more. They do have them on the Let Pot website but they're also available on Amazon, eBay, a lot of the hydroponics places, you know, you're not going to struggle to find them. Just been looking through these rather extensive notes that I printed out from the website and also the notes that Letpot sent me when they first sent me this pre-production model. One thing I forgot to mention is the fact that this can be controlled via Alexa. I would never have an Alexa in the house for obvious reasons but I know millions of people do have them in the house and they work well for them so that's another selling point of this. Fully automated, can be controlled via an app or a touchscreen and also by voice commands. So hopefully you've enjoyed taking a look at this LED pot desktop automated hydroponic growing system. Thanks very much to Letpot for sending me this to make the video on and initially they just said you know just do an unboxing video but I want to test this. thoroughly for the lifespan or the growing period of whatever it is I'm growing in here so I told them i was going to do another you know one two three videos on this to give you guys the progress i don't want to just you know sing the virtues of something that i haven't tested so this is the testing this is where it begins i've showed you how it works and let's see if it works the The link to the Indiegogo project, from letpot is in the video description and also in the pinned comment. if for whatever reason you're watching on a device where that doesn't come up or you can't see it you can search for Letpot LPH Max on Indiegogo and you'll find it there. i think it starts on the 7th of september. 2022, so hopefully by the time I edit this video and get it out it will be active. Thanks for watching, I'll see you in the next video. And just in case anybody was in any doubts, that's the light off, that's the Letpot system set up and that's the door shut. Let's come back to it in a week.