GardynReviews of mygardyn.com

It’s either Water shooting out of the back of the Gardyn or no water at all! I have 3 units that I’ve had less than a year and already having major issues. The staff is friendly but not timely when it comes to customer service or repairs it literally takes hours sometimes a day to get any reply to an issue. Yes you have to email back and forth my current issue is still not resolved yet we been emailing back and forth for weeks. A lot of the problems with this system are due to flimsy and cheap parts. However they will send you 4 replacement flimsy tubes and leave you to fix your Gardyn yourself regardless of the issue. This is not a system for a person that is a beginner when it comes to gardening. You will not be able to rely on kelby and you have to purchase so many other items to keep your plants healthy and alive. Gardyn plant food doesn’t dissolve and builds up outside the columns which will most likely crack them over time their merchandise such as the hydro boost product that just came out I tried it with a fresh clean system and new pods and yes less than 2 weeks the system now has alge and crust on the columns. Buyers please beware don’t be like me and invest THOUSANDS of dollars on what you think will easily feed your family. This ain’t it..

very good, i like it very much

Initially, when I received my Gardyn it was a good experience. Everything grew and I was happy. Unfortunately I got some sort of white mold on my plants and had to throw them all out. After that, I took a break from the Gardyn to educate myself on how to properly care for plants. Well a few months later I go to turn it back on and …. nothing. No power. No lights. I though this was extremely odd as I had only used the machine ONE time. I tried all the troubleshooting and nothing worked. I looked for a number to call the company. No number for contact was readily available. So I emailed. The email I sent stated I had already tried what was in the troubleshooting articles but they sent me the steps again. This was very frustrating because who has all day to email back and forth with a company. The troubleshooting process was so lengthy I eventually lost track of the emailing due to time constraints. Now here I am again trying to get the my Gardyn on and once again I had to go through the email troubleshooting rigmarole only for them to determine the lid needs to be replaced and they want me to pay for it because the warranty is so short. All in all the Gardyn is the worst experience I have had with customer service. A product that costs upwards of $600 should have a longer warranty especially when they have so many known troubleshooting issues. This was a complete waste of my money. I could have bought two Earthboxes for the money I spent with Gardyn and at least I know those would last me for YEARS.

DON'T DO IT. I have now had mine for over two years and it has been hell the entire time. This is one of the poorest thought out hydroponic products around. Tons of failure points to the extent that it feels purposely made as an example of planned obsolescence. You will not only be cleaning this thing CONSTANTLY, you will also be replacing the tubing quarterly and the pump annually. For the price, this thing is absurd. On top of the device itself, their subscription business model is a scam. They have the whole "care for the planet" B.S. on their site yet they try to sell you proprietary pods? The complete opposite of sustainability. Product is bad. Support is worse. And their business model of fake "save the planet" is about as predatory as capitalism gets.

The company wrote back and wanted to give me a discount on the parts…which was not even worth the trouble. Thanks for responding, that only confirm that the Gardyn isn’t as good if you have replaced parts. You have replaced the top because internet wasn’t picking up on 1st lid. Not my fault and camera. Again wasn’t my fault. It just STOPPED functioning…

This is the story of how I turned from wanting to be a giant cheerleader for this company, to being so frustrated that I will never spend another dime on their products again: I loved the idea of growing fresh veggies indoors for my family, and seduced by the slick marketing and my initial success, I purchased 3 units within the last year. I was quite happy until I started experience equipment failure in 2 of the units. The first time it happened, customer service was slow but adequate, and after sending me a new pump (which it turned out was not the issue) they sent me a new lid that fixed the problem. Almost the same day unit A got repaired, I noticed unit B's plants were wilting. I threw the new pump from unit A into B as I knew this would be a trouble shooting step. I verified that the pump was not the issue, and I reached out to customer support explaining the steps I already took. Thus started my long journey toward what should have been a cut and dried resolution. Their first response was to send me a bunch of links to generic trouble shooting steps, demonstrating that they did not read my email for comprehension. I emailed again, RE-explaining that the issue was the lid as I had already completed all previous trouble shooting steps. They responded that even though I had just changed the pump, they were going to send me a new pump, which is completely illogical. The new pump took two weeks to reach me (I live in a major metro area). I put in the new pump and reached back out (surprise!) to let them know that it was still not working. They confirmed my original suspicion that it was an issue with the lid, and told me my two options were to send in my current lid to have it repaired (at least a 3 week turn around) or to accept a refurbished lid that had been thoroughly tested and inspected by a specialist of some sort. The refurbished lid was purportedly the faster option and considering that I had been hand watering these plants 3x daily for weeks at this point I agreed. It took just shy of ANOTHER two weeks for the refurbished lid to come, and when it arrived, my heart sank as there was visible damage to the light plugs. I tried it anyway (each time you connect a new lid, it's a two person project that takes a minimum of 30 minutes if everything goes well) and it would not connect. I spent several days trying all the trouble shooting steps that I'd received from previously, and not only did it not work, but it somehow interfered with another unit, which then also had to be troubleshot. I finally got it to connect! Bad news though, was that the pump was still not engaging with this 'new' lid. I reached back out (the email train was getting quite lengthy), and after having me disconnect the lights for some reason, they offered to send me... a new pump. At this point I felt like a character in No Exit, and patience thoroughly exhausted, was about ready to claw my eyes out. I told them NOT to send me a pump, that I would put in the new pump from unit A (to replace the brand new pump on lid 2 of unit B??), to verify that in fact the problem was and remained NOT THE PUMP. In the course of changing the pump I lost my grip on the annoyingly short and hard to grip plug wiring, which retracted into the inside of the lid, and was unreachable by any means that I had available. At this, customer support finally agreed send me a new lid. I was livid by this point at the slow walking and told them that to make this right for me the two actions I would find acceptable would be a lid sent expedited, or for them to take this not quite 6 month old (at the original time of break down) unit back and refund me. They pretty much ignored this direct statement several times, defaulting instead to perky, meaningless customer service jargon (Don't worry! Sorry you're having trouble and rest assured we are well on the way to getting your unit up and running!) which was supremely irritating considering the inefficient, nonsensical approach to this problem. I pressed the issue regarding expedited shipping so I didn't need to wait two weeks for a part a THIRD time, and was told that due to stock issues, they were unable to accommodate this request (they did prompt me however to hurry up and return the busted lid to them- I assume this was not intentional irony). I was assured that they found this as unacceptable as I did (more patronizing customer service jargon) and offered me a $20 off coupon on my next purchase; after literally weeks of getting nowhere with an $800 non functional pile of PVC sitting in my living room, THIS is what they came up with to make things right. I told them to keep it, as I will never spend another dime on one of their products. Today, a working lid finally arrived, and my unit is operational again 48 days, conservatively dozens of emails, and 145 manual waterings later. I'm far more relieved than satisfied.

I wanted to wait about 6 months before writing a review to fully get an idea of how good Gardyn is. Unfortunately, I'm not impressed, and am severely disappointed. To start, the membership and price per plant is beyond insane. You can pick up 100 1 inch rock wool squares on Amazon for about 10 bucks, buy your own seeds at 250 seeds for 4.95, and either reuse the pods, or replace them with pods you can find online for about 5 dollars per 50 pods. That's 100 plants for about 25 bucks, while the same amount gets you a whopping 4-5 plants from garden. Yikes, holy markup. With that kind of mark-up, you really have to wonder what makes the system cost 800 buckaroonies other than gimacs and how much markup there is on that. With the membership you get Kelby, which is supposed to be a virtual assistant, but I didn't see much difference between when it was on and after I cancled my membership. My plants grew the same. They're plants. That's what they do. For the most part I got messages like "your plants are growing!" or "add water!" and "check out these new plants you can buy!". You get 10 "free" pods a month with the membership, but you pay 40 dollars a month for the membership. So that's 4 dollars a plant in the reality where things still cost money (it's not free if you pay 40 dollars a month for it). If you read above, you'll see this is an insane amount of money for a bit of rock wool and seeds in a plastic container. The system setup is nice and compact, but the app and system is severely lacking for 800 dollars. First, Gardyn won't work on 5ghz WiFi, so you either need to run separate networks, or screw around in your router to get Gardyn to only connect to the 2.4ghz network if you have a router that manages the network devices use automatically. Second, if you don't get the membership, you don't get push notifications on your phone when water level is low, and Gardyn doesn't shut off the pump when it detects it's low. You'll walk in to hear it grinding away. However, Gardyn is more than happy to give push notifications to your phone when they have new plants available for purchase for the low low price of 5.99 plus shipping and handling. Gardyn is nice if you live in an apartment and don't have the space. But for most people, I don't see the difference or justification for Gardyn over aerogarden, or simply building your own system out of PVC piping for a couple hundred bucks.

Its poorly made and poorly designed in terms of functionality. The subscription is a total rip-off. I regret my purchase. It does look pretty at least. But the design is terrible, and it is extremely flimsy. It broke in a bunch of places the first time I tried to clean out the water reservoir because it cannot hold up its own weight if it is tipped in any direction, which is pretty impossible to avoid when you are taking it off the reservoir to rinse that part out. Forget about deep cleaning, unless you are going to take all your plants out and run an expensive amount of hydrogen peroxide.