Solar Irrigation: A domestic and easiest way to settle an irrigation system.

Solar irrigation is a domestic irrigation technique, it tries to exploit the evaporation that occurs in a closed enclosure by a transparent plastic cover, within temperature rise due to the greenhouse effect, to water by evaporation and condensation occurs within the plastic cover.

How it works:

Operation is simple, the system consists of the following parts:

1. Transparent plastic cover.
2. Container for irrigation water.

The water used for irrigation is installed into the container for it, and once the plastic cover Is paced, water evaporates slowly during the day, causing the rise of the relative humidity inside the cover.

When humidity comes in contact with the wall of the cover, it is condensed, because the wall is cooler than the air inside of the cover. This condensation will produce a continuous drip along the wall of the casing, producing a constant flow in the surface inside of the cover.

Condensation occurs at night, when the outside temperature drops and cools the cover, causing condensation on the wall of the cover.

When to use Solar Irrigation?

It is an irrigation technique used in small gardens, where it is used as a plastic cover the top of PET bottles of 5 liters which are normally used for bottling water, into which the base of a PET bottle is placed smaller (from 1.5 liter) acting as a container for the irrigation water, as shown in Figure 2.

Advantages of Solar Irrigation:

The main advantage of this system is that it is an inexpensive system when used in small surfaces, beside its handling is simple and only requires that you fill in when the water container is empty. It also allows to reuse water bottles.

Obviously it is not a useful system in vocational agriculture, since its management would require a lot of manpower and control would be impossible, as irrigation would depend only on the radiation provided by the sun.

Figure 3. Example of applying sun watering to tomato plants in a garden.