With demand for local food continuing at a strong pace, a year-round greenhouse is often a good business venture. You can greatly improve your chances for a successful greenhouse business with proper planning. Planning for a greenhouse business requires basic business planning -- thorough research and usually spreadsheets. Here are five essential tools to aid that process, based…
A climate battery is a ground to air heat exchanger, which provides year-round heating and cooling of solar greenhouses and other structures using the thermal mass of the soil underground. Ceres’ patent-pending Ground to Air Heat Transfer (GAHT™) is a high-performance climate battery specialized for year-round greenhouse growers. For more on how a GAHT™ system…
Year round greenhouses, or even those used for season extension, face the challenge of extreme temperature swings. A greenhouse structure can collect excessive amounts of heat during the day when the sun is out, causing them to easily overheat. However, they quickly lose this heat at night due to a lack of insulation, resulting in…
Growing in a year-round greenhouse often means contending with heat. For most crops, photosynthesis slows when temperatures exceed 95 F. As the dog-days of summer hit, we explore the most energy-efficient ways of cooling a greenhouse. 1. Keep heat out (Shade Cloth) Best for: all climates The first is to reduce light and heat gain…
“The Phase Change Material has been up for a few weeks now and is keeping the greenhouse about 20 degrees warmer than the minimum outside temp. Without the PCM, the greenhouse was about 10 degrees warmer. As of today [Nov 17th] I am still getting lots of tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers. My Myer’s lemon…
What do I want to grow and when? In other words why do you want a greenhouse? This is the first question we start with when planning any greenhouse, because what you want to grow, over what seasons, dictates a lot about your greenhouse design. Generally, we group greenhouses into three categories by their temperature…
Learn how to harness and store solar energy to keep your greenhouse growing through the winter for free (or next to nothing) Greenhouses can be interesting environments to grow in. This is because standard greenhouse materials like glass and plastic (“glazing”) are extremely good at letting in light and heat in, and extremely good at…
