The main focus of the project was to design a product that could be used to water up to 4 plants indoors and outdoors. With this established I developed a list of ten important requirements that the product needed to meet. Of them the most important two were that the product be effective and it must be versatile. This meant it must deliver 2 gallons of water per hour to four plants simultaneously and it must be readily used indoors and outdoors.

With these requirements and the customers in mind I created a house of quality. I was then able to start brainstorming ideas. This process focussed around my functional decomposition and my morphological chart. The functional decomposition revealed five subfunctions with the most important function being that is must provide adequate water to specimens.

From these I was able to develop seven feasible concepts. Each design had different tubing network and different valve positions along the networks. There was one concept that had five automatic valves but this would have been too expensive to create. Another concept experimented with the idea of controlling water through five tubes with only three valves. I evaluated each concept to find which one would satisfy my requirements the best. It was found that a concept named the Double Y Configuration would be the best.

Before beginning my final project I had to get a feel for how the water flowed through the tubing and the valves. I performed a couple experiments to determine and thus I could now determine exactly the parts I needed.

Now I could begin my final design. Since I had such a well-developed concept this process was easy. The project I designed required mostly off-the-shelf parts. Thus little fabrication was necessary and I simply had to locate the parts. I was able to find most of what I needed at Menards. This included clear vinyl tubing, various adapters, and several manual valves. The last main part I needed was a timer valve. I located this over the internet at ehow. By this stage in the project I had already purchased this part.

With the purchasing of all my parts I could begin assembly. There was a few glitches in this process but nothing catastrophic. I began by cutting the tubing to the proper lengths and then connected each fitting to its appropriate location along the tubing.

The largest problem I encountered during this step was that the original clamps that I purchased to seal the connections turned out to leak. I solved this problem by buy some screw clamps that allowed me to tighten the connections even more.

After all the parts had been purchased and the product was fully assembled, it was found that the total price was $65.18. This was well within the budget and proved to be cheaper then some of the benchmarks already manufactured.

Through some testing it was found that the final product performed like it was designed. It met all of the requirements including the two most important stated above. This attested to the successful completion of the project.

The product will have its true test in the spring my mother begins watering her plants outside the house. As of right now there are now future modifications in the future. This should be a useful tool in gardening around the house.