Hacker News Reader

Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

I love the irony of this being posted on a "green" website when it's an obvious waste of energy (both to build and power) compared to just keeping a decent watering schedule.

Nevertheless I like the build, although something using ZigBee would be more handy, unless you only have a couple of plants, otherwise the cabling might become unwieldy. And I wonder if there could be some way of extracting energy from the plant itself, making it self sustainable...?

View on HN

Many plants are greatly over-watered.

Electronics such as this are usually asleep, drawing tiny amounts of power (we had one in a shipping container that needed it's battery changed no more than 18 months).

A decent watering schedule is not an overwatering schedule. Watering plants properly is not a difficult activity.

Further even assuming that it is very low power, just the energy and materials used to construct it blow away any notion that it is green.

This is an anti-green product. It is using products made via energy and chemical rich processes, then vampiring power, to solve a complete non-problem. It is novel, and it's right for HN, but the GP's point is completely on the money.

Well, even if a fixed schedule isn't adequate, a single (as opposed to one per plant) device that you can use to manually (with a led instead of a full on IP device) evaluate if the plant needs watering and that uses no power between usages would be much "greener".

I wonder if a potato could power it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com