While I was organising my trip to my hometown in Argentina, I was thinking about the best places to visit whithin those 4 weeks, where to get the best empanadas, friends I want to see and so on... I suddenly realised I had a problem to solve (a technical one): I have some plants in my Sydney-sider balcony that were condmened to die since noone was going to be there to water them! So, how can I water my plants while I am 12,000 kms away on -literally- the other side of the globe???

Well, I'd like to share with you what I've done to resolve this problem and perhaps this might also help you with a similar problem?
Short story: I watered the plants using a mobile app!
Long story:
I got this electric water pump along with an arline tubing, like the ones in the following images:


Once the water pump is connected to the power, it starts working without any further actions (just plug & play!), by sucking in the water from one tube connector and pumping it from the other one.
I connected a piece of airline tubing to each connector, one getting the water from a big recipient and the other releasing the water towards the plants. The only remaining thing for this to work is, as I mentioned before, connecting this device to the wall so it starts sucking the water and pouring it to the plants.
In order to allow this installation to work from overseas, I had to find a way to turn on and off the electric supply to the water pump. That is when the following device came to the rescue:

This is very simple, it's just a Wifi socket that works along with a smartphone App, allowing me to turn on and off the socket from an App in my phone!

Indoor installation:

Outdoor installation:

Finally, I got all I needed:
- A Wifi socket connected to a smartphone app
- An electric water pump connected to a Wifi socket
- A 50 litre water container.
- A Wifi webcam (to show-off what I've done hehe)
- The plants.
The only left thing to do is just watering the plants whenever I want to..by activating the Wifi socket for the time I want the water to flow! :)
I hope you enjoyed!