Some of you correctly identified that the client's desires are the real problem here. Unfortunately, their ego and your desire for paycheck requires sacrifice sometimes. Even doing your best, I assure you that a few decades hence your successor will ask "What dumbass did this?" https://twitter.com/funranium/status/1300558143668154369
An automatic watering system is a nice idea. It sounds like you're use cutting edge, state of the art, SmartLab technology when you write it up in the grant proposal or give tours to those who don't know better.

Really, all you've mastered are alarm clocks and solenoid valves.
But the reason you got hired is to try to limit tritium contamination. NOTE: not *prevent*, just minimize. Tritium (H-3) is deeply annoying to work with due to the hydrogen migration. Your only hope is to keep it bound up in whatever compound is being used in the study.
If your tritium work is HTO, T2O or, Crom help you, T2 gas you might as well just hose down the greenhouse at the outset of work and get it over with. Like buying a new car and immediately scratching the paint with your keys; it's yours, it's gonna happen anyway, let's do this.
Which brings us to "¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ limits are high". Tritium contamination and effluent limits are, indeed, surprisingly high. And if you know that this space is going to be used for more and more tritium work, cleanup concerns fade and you starting doing worker bioassay instead.
That approach falls apart the instant you ever want to use this space for something else or, more likely, ever take anything out of it. Tritium decon is, to say the least, difficult. How exactly do you get hydrogen out of something? NO, NOT THAT HYDROGEN! I want the H-3 only.
Because chemically speaking tritium is no different than any other hydrogen molecule, it happily soaks into most any material and does hydrogenous exchange with any mundane H-1 for some spicy H-3 anywhere it can.

Did you have woodwork in there? That'll have to go.
Plastics? Ohhh, you better believe there's a lot of hydrogen in them.

Which brings us to "Whatever, but no PVC."
This is another part of admitting defeat that you know this place is going to get, and this is a technical term, crapped up but you would like to not have An Incident™ in the process.

Because while, yes, tritium is *chemically* hydrogen it has some special behaviors.
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