A typical window garden runs on an ebb & flow, with flooding happening at intervals according to climate and plant needs. Evaporation will be different in Finland than Cuba.
I’m curious as to how you come to think NFT would be more space efficient? The vertical window garden setup in the picture should be able to fit more foliage than the side-by-side configuration most NFT seems to use.
Line it with ground cover fabric and you don’t have to care about material, rot or anything ;)
I built a wood planter on legs with no bottom, attached ground cover fabric in a sling/U-shape that hung a bit away from the wood in all sides.
A dm of LECA, then soil and compost as per usual. LECA makes for nice drainage and water reservoir.
Keeping the soil away from the wood made it so I’ve had no rot or degradation at all for 6 years as air comes in around to dry it all out.
Sizewise I covered the whole short end, and made it deep enough to fit the door and other furniture, about 40x60x195 cm.
Check out figure 2 it shows equivalent cooling in energy units. Meaning how much energy is carried away by perspiration, and showing it for different levels of humidity. I read it as between 5-10% lower at higher humidity.
Compare that to the radiant heat difference (from 32 degrees to 22, as per the cooling chart) which cools you about 286 % more. And with convective cooling we expect even more at higher temperature differences.
(Calculated with Boltzmanns law for 310 K body temperature)
Check the source, net difference is 10%
You are unfortunately wrong in your scepticism, they’ve been used for millennia to great effect, and are even part of how ice was made.
In a modestly arid climate (like a mountainous region) with 30% ambient humidity, you can achieve, a 12 °C drop, that’s a lot more than the ~10% of lost sweat cooling.
The tech is called Window farm and had a quite large, global community developing the system for simplicity, climates and yield. I haven’t looked at it since pre-pandemic times, but the site seems to have been updated since.
Check it out, there’s a lot of cool solutions upcycling everyday objects!
As for NFT, I haven’t tried it yet, but have had Kratky, DWC, Ebb & Flow, window farm, and am currently designing an aeroponics system to play around with.
Haven’t ever chosen NFT as the simple setups require a lot more supports and/or floor area than I can comfortably accommodate. And DWC/Kratky with a bubbler seems to outperform it with less fiddling or effort.
I’m now curious to see if aeroponics will lower the water usage, and how it will affect yields.
For home use, I’d suggest DWC, with or without bubbler, as probably the most yield/fun for least hassle. Having multiple plants in the same system will always lead to complications and unnecessary mass death.