Complex hydroponic and contained water systems such as fish aquariums, swimming pools, and spas must monitor water chemistry on a daily basis. Currently there are more than 4,800 commercial hydroponic farms, 767,500 in-home hydroponic gardens, 12.6 million fish aquariums, 10 million swim pools, and 21,000 spas in the U.S. The water condition monitoring market is currently projected to be around $200 million, with steady growth rate. Demand for hydroponic farm products has been increasing as customers adopt more healthy eating patterns. In addition, bad weather conditions are shifting food growers from field crops to hydroponic farms. On hydroponic farms, water monitoring systems are critical for ensuring plant growth and crop yield. The proposed technology will make hydroponics crop growing cheaper and potentially ameliorate food shortage issues. As an extension, this technology can also be applied to metal-solution based water condition sensing technology for pollutant, nuclear waste, and toxin detection.
Regular water monitoring is a cumbersome and costly process, but without it, deviations in water chemistry can result in damage to plants and fish as well as financial losses. This team has developed a smart-phone based, low cost, water condition sensor. This product will measure, record, notify and guide decision making for maintaining healthy water systems and optimize growth of hydroponic plants and crops. The novelty of this technology lies in being able to measure the pH, electric conductivity (EC/nutrient concentration), temperature, and water level using only a single electrode. Compared to today's more common multi-sensor water condition monitoring systems, using a single sensor will significantly reduce cost and complexity of operation. This single sensor senses changes in the electro-chemical interaction (e.g. voltage and capacitance) between two different metals as a result of changes in characteristics of the water conditions.
The daily monitoring of water chemistries in complex hydroponic plant growing and contained water systems such as fish aquariums, swimming pools, and spas is a combersome and costly job, where often overlooked can result in plant, fish, and financial loss. Our technology is a smart phone based low cost water condition sensor, where the pH, EC (nutrient concentration), and temperature of the water solution is measured using a single pair of sensing electrodes. This significantly reduces the cost and complexity of the sensor, which are the major pain points of existing water condition monitoring devices. The objective of this project is to build a bussiness model for our water condition sensor through market analysis, customer interviews, and technology validation. Based on our market analysis results, the U.S. hydroponic equipment market has grown steady with total revenue of $620 million for 2014 (annual growth rate 7.7%). The market size for the water condition monitoring devices is estimated to be $60 million, approximately 10% of the total hydroponic equipment market. The aquaponic fish farming is another rapidly growing market (also in the U.S.), where aquaculture fish products have rapidly increased, exceeding the quantity (tons) of beef products since 2012. The global aquaculture market showed total revenue of $4 billion in 2013 with a subset of $160 million for water condition testing equipment. Throughout the project, our team interviewed more than 100 customers (52% in person) in hydroponic plant growing, fish aquariums, swimming pool/spa, and environmental and construction water condition monitoring markets. The customers include individual hobbyists, retailers, commercial hydroponic green houses, and water quality researchers. Based on the customer interviews, we figured out the customer pain points - fragile and bulky sensing electrodes that needs to be replaced on regular basis, hard calibration, cleaning and maintenance procedures, and finally identified the two target markets which are the hydroponics and aquaponics water condition monitoring. Although there is limited opportunity for the highend fish aqurium market (salt water coral aquariums) - the majority of aquarium owners use simple low cost test strips and test kits. The situation was similar for the swimming pool and spa markets. The construction and environmental water condition monitoring market was not mature enough for wireless remote monitoring devices. In the hydroponics and aquaculture markets, our technology was competitive compared to existing products, which can effective serve the customer pain points and needs. However, there were major pivots to figure out the our value proposition for the two customer segments, which is to reduce the product (plant, crop or fish) losses and improve the quality of remote water condition monitoring. Furthermore, as part of the business model development, we identified three business partners - the ecoponic group, LLC (Akron, OH), OMNITEK, LLC (Beachwood, OH), and Cropking Inc. (Lodi, OH) that will help our team move toward technology commercialization. On the technology side, we have developed our sensor prototype which includes the single pair of sensing electrodes, the pH, EC, and temperature sensor, signal processing, and the WiFi unit. In addition to the sensor hardware, the software modules including the microcontroller program and the smart phone apps are added. Now, the basic functionality of the sensor is verified, and we are keep working on evaluating the performance of the sensor prototype with the help of our business partners.
