DIY: Keep your flowers wet and your balcony dry

Although water stains on a balcony sounds like an aesthetic issue it's also (and most importantly) a matter of life and death for your tiles. If they're not built well and/or your balcony has not the correct inclination for drainage, in the long run overwatering your plants might get you into big costly trouble. Same goes in case you use automatic watering. Their joints love to leak, in the vast majority of times they're placed under and not over the plants so there we go again.

Here's how I dealt with the whole thing:

First of all, I made my own watering "system". No timers, no sprayers. Just got myself a hose and made tiny hole(s) with a needle over each pot and tied small pieces of rope to make it drip:

Connect it to water with the lever set less than 1/4 of wide open:

The reason is that even though the hose is long (>10m) for all these pots the amount of water needed is very low as I leave it on 24/7. Therefore, if anything goes wrong worst case scenario is a low leak (nothing went wrong so far).

This way you have continuous watering with very low supply keeping the soil of your plants always humid. Ideal but you can't do so unless you are OK with a mess in your balcony OR you have a way to lead the water to a drain.

So here comes PVC to the rescue:

As you can see I made my own drainpipe and put this back stuff for insulation in the joints. Why I didn't buy a ready set of drainpipes to save me effort and time? Because a 6m drainpipe (longest part) wouldn't fit through the stairway of the building. I also found ventilation pipes to be cheaper than drain pipes so I bought some and cut them in half (which made the whole thing even cheaper). Plus a had a few spares anyway. So now all the pots can leak as much as they want to,

and the whole thing goes to the main drain of the building:

See how the water from the flowers stains? Now I only have to clean those 3 tiles whenever I want to.

I also bought this tower of flower power which can also leak over the drain hole of the balcony:

Here's a funny thing when you put flowers vertically: You don't have to water each one of them individually, especially with a system like mine. The top one waters the rest - see the drop:

The black lines you see are in order to lead the water from the other pot on the right to the same drain:

Result: No timers, no batteries, no stains while the flowers have all the water they need. Cost: next to ridiculous. PVC pipes are inexpensive and you can even buy the cheapest hose for such use, you literally don't care even if it leaks🙂

If you have any questions feel free to ask!