Plants, soil are great acoustic insulators. Studies have shown that living walls can reduce ambient noise by up to 40 decibels, an important benefit to those who work or live close to noisy streets, highways and airports. If you live on a busy street, ambient noise levels may average 75 decibels.
Frequently Asked Questions
Living walls contribute to improved indoor air quality. They naturally provide oxygen, humidity. When people are surrounded by plants, they are happier, healthier, as well as more creative, productive and focused. They experience less stress.
Living walls will save the property owner on air conditioning and heating costs.
The need to replant will vary with diligence to proper care, and plant material.
Yes. In some cases it may take a little redesign for the additional weight of the living walls, most of the time retrofitting is relatively easy.
Living walls used to grow food such as vegetables, herbs and fruits, requires several things: proper orientation, lighting, water, drainage, and nutrition.
Depending on plant type, wall orientation, light intensity, maturity, and average daily temperatures, water supply varies greatly.
Maintenance requirements are simple and depend on selective plant types.
Depends on the plant selected for growth. It was believed that mediums should match the lifespan of living walls plants.
Lighting is critical to the success of your living walls. In nearly every indoor application, supplemental lighting will be necessary to ensure the proper intensity and spectrum for plant growth.
Plants need a dark period to rest and prevent metabolic fatigue. Therefore, grow lights should only be run 12-15 hours maximum per day—typically from 7 AM to 8 or 9 PM (to mimic light conditions in tropical regions). The rest of the time, they should be in darkness, or near darkness.
If security lighting is required in the area of the Live Walls, it should be of very low intensity and not directed toward the plants.
Living Walls does an excellent job of growing a broad array of greens, lettuce and herbs. When those plants are grown indoors, the plants must receive enough light of the correct spectrum.
When installing living walls indoors, water containment is critical:
- The wall planters are rear-draining, and would include a rubber hose drain assembly to contain runoff water.
- The indoor wall planters hold twice the soil volume as the standard outdoor wall planters to provide ample growing space for a wide selection of tropical plants.
Outdoor living walls has more options for planter size, drainage method and water delivery.
- Large wall planters are available with a bottom drain or a rear drain option (when runoff water must be contained, such as over doorways or windows).
- Standard wall planters have a bottom drain option, and are most commonly used with annuals, edibles, succulents, and a number of cold-winter hardy perennials.
Functionally, living walls can be placed as high as your building infrastructure, plumbing, and ability to access it for maintenance will allow.
In climates with warm winter weather, irrigation will need to continue throughout the winter.
The infrastructure of the living walls can be installed in every season, with some caveats:
The irrigation system should not be activated at temperatures at or below freezing. Thus, the irrigation system will need to wait to be tested until temperature climbs above freezing. Nozzles should not be installed until the irrigation system has been tested and run to flush out any debris introduced during the installation. Generally, plants should be not be installed during winter. We recommend that they are held at the nursery until the spring.