Chinese Greenhouse Construction

let's do something interesting today today we're going to talk about a particular type of greenhouse called the chinese greenhouse and its construction what most people don't realize is the food we eat in north america a big portion of that comes from china and a lot of that food in china is grown in greenhouses but when we think greenhouses we have a particular type of greenhouse in mind like the ones in the video on the side here but in china although those type of greenhouses exist the predominant greenhouse is a particular design that we refer to as the chinese greenhouse now it is a passive solar greenhouse but it's got other features to it as well and it's very distinctive in its design its features and how it operates so in this video we're going to discuss chinese greenhouses simple thing that's the name of this channel we have piles of other videos on greenhouses and growing you can check out after this one so if you like this video you gotta hit the like button otherwise youtube's not gonna know the only way you can actually tell youtube is to hit that like button and subscribe to the channel do it now there are four aspects to a chinese greenhouse that make it distinctive and a chinese greenhouse and as i go forward we're going to discuss them the first aspect that is worth considering is the length of the span of the transparent material chinese greenhouses tend to have long spans on them the next one is the orientation most greenhouses in north america other than passive solar greenhouses will be oriented north and south a chinese greenhouse and a passive solar greenhouse is oriented east and west and there's a specific reason for that we'll get into later the third thing is a chinese greenhouse has an insulated and not just insulated but a thermal mass north wall and these do several things which are quite intriguing which we will discuss the fourth thing that is very distinctive on a chinese greenhouse is the insulation bike most chinese greenhouses have this and it allows them to operate without adding additional energy in colder climates so the first thing i'm going to discuss is how they make them chinese greenhouses as kits are available on alibaba and even you can get them on amazon and ebay and other places usually they come to china surprise surprise and often they're made out of metal although i have seen them constructed out of bamboo and wood metal is the predominant material that's used to construct the chinese greenhouse you can get long spans and you can get the proper curves that are necessary and if the curves are made from the factory in the middle there isn't going to be any problems with plastic being stretched over it and catching and tearing most if not all chinese greenhouses use poly plastic as a covering and you don't want it to be torn or cracked or wrecked so the type of frame material you use matters next we're going to discuss the length or the width of a chinese greenhouse chinese greenhouses tend to be long 100 200 300 feet long or more but what's distinctive about them is the width or the span of the poly that's facing the sun and it tends to be wide often they're 30 40 50 feet wide which allows for you to grow quite a bit of crops most chinese greenhouses are designed and constructed for commercial purposes often they're 3 000 to 10 000 or more square feet which is a large commercial operation for one person or two people in china often a large greenhouse like that is run by a family a husband and a wife and it's their sole income so one of the big special features to a chinese greenhouse that tends to distinguish it from a passive solar greenhouse or what we call a solar greenhouse in north america is the north wall a passive solar or solar greenhouse will have an insulated north wall a chinese greenhouse will have a thermal mass north wall and they build and design them often with different materials but primarily with things like brick or concrete or clay clay being the most common material that's used in the north wall of a chinese greenhouse so that as they're oriented east-west they will have exposure to the sun which is in the south all day long now china like north america is in the northern hemisphere and these greenhouses work really well in areas that get down to -20 or colder one of the beautiful things about the chinese greenhouse is the university of manitoba in canada did some research on this design and without adding any additional heat in the manitoba winter which is minus 30 to minus 40 at times the inside of this greenhouse without insulating the floor never got below freezing or if it did it went to minus one that's with no additional heat so when we consider the chinese greenhouse design in the north wall and that thermal mass it works and it's been working for a long time for a lot of people in china but for some reason we're really not using it all that much in north america here now the last really important part about a chinese greenhouse is the majority of them incorporate something called an insulated blanket and although you can automate this i actually in my research and looking around the majority of actual chinese greenhouses in use in china just do it manually it's a blanket that rolls up on top of or it can be done inside of a double layer greenhouse that adds a lot more insulation at night so the blanket is rolled down at night and it's rolled up in the daytime and what this does is transparent material even the best of it whether it's double air blown poly or double or triple layer polycarbonate or double pane or triple pane glass r2 r3 is the best you're going to get you're not going to do any better than that but if you add an insulated blanket you can start looking at our 10 possibly that's a huge difference in insulation and if you can save heat from escaping through your transparent material it's a lot cheaper than creating new heat to get you through the night or you don't have to create as much heat to get you through the night so one of the reasons i think china is doing so well in the agriculture market right now is these greenhouses these greenhouses allow individuals to grow they're not designed as much for a corporate structure because you've got to roll up that insulated blanket and roll it down every night it's designed for someone that wants a job running a greenhouse but if you start getting into a five to ten thousand square foot greenhouse that can work in a canadian or northern american climate year-round with no additional heat or very little additional heat if you were to just add a small pellet wood stove or rocket mass heater inside you could go in a minus 30 degree winter situation inside your greenhouse plus five plus six celsius now this is a fantastic temperature inside but it's enough that you're not going to kill off your plants and you can grow not eight months of the year but 12 months of the year this changes everything if you want to look at a greenhouse business what it means is that your roi or your construction cost is way cheaper than the designs that we're using in north america right now for the four season greenhouses if you look at the four season greenhouses we're using right now in north america they're expensive they're often built in the hundred dollar two hundred and fifty dollar a square foot range it takes a long time to pay this off and you still have to heat them and they're not as insulated or energy efficient as this chinese greenhouse is so what if we could build these things and have them functional in the 10 to 20 dollar per square foot range now you got a business that you're paying off a lot quicker so where do i get these guess what they're for sale all over the place on alibaba you can get them on the internet and order them at whatever size you want and they're coming in at good prices they're incorporating poly covers they're not using in most cases polycarbonate which is a better material but it's exponentially more expensive they're not building them out of glass they're building them out of just plastic sheets and they're using metal as a frame and they're allowing you to fill up the north wall with clay with simple construction techniques so that you can actually have a thermal wall that will absorb heat during the day from the sun which is free energy and release that heat at night to keep your plants warm meaning if it gets a lot colder you only got to add a small amount of heat to get your greenhouse through the night chinese greenhouses are worth looking at if you want to get into the greenhouse [Music] business you

Channel: Simple Tek

Views: 397,425

Keywords: Chinese Greenhouse, Chinese Greenhouse Construction, Chinese Greenhouse Advantages, Solar Greenhouse, Passive Greenhouse, Passive Solar Greenhouse, roll up blanket, insulate blanket, thermal wall, clay wall, metal greenhouse, Chinese food, Chinese growing, Chinese agriculture

Id: WNJnwCbnFX4

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021