HEAT your Greenhouse (15 Ways)

foreign I'll cover 15 methods I use to keep my Greenhouse warm in the winter now some of these are unique to the design of my geothermal Greenhouse but most of them will work in any Greenhouse anywhere specifically numbers six through nine and twelve through 15. all right let's get started first up let's talk about the walls of the greenhouse there are three traits of the walls that help it either collect or store Heat the first thing is that I made the entire Greenhouse the walls are made of three-quarter inch plywood inside and out that means the walls are very thick and have a lot of thermal Mass on top of it as you've seen in other videos about the pallet wood siding the whole building is clad in pallet wood which is very thick and so that adds another layer of wood to the already thick wall so thick walls is point number one the second one is I insulated the walls heavily I went on to Facebook and Craigslist and other places where I could find styrofoam that people were giving away and I would use that styrofoam cut it down into pieces and cram it into the walls as I was building them the third area is that the interior walls are all clad in two layers of heavy professional Grade weed barrier specifically black weed barrier and well what does that do let me show you a great way to illustrate the benefit of having dark colors on the walls of a greenhouse is today it's a typical New England fall day it's about 50 degrees Fahrenheit outside and if you notice the temperature of this white bucket is about 90 degrees however the temperature of the wall is about 120 degrees so whenever possible use dark colors in your greenhouse and they will collect additional solar energy the next section is the windows and the doors I made sure to use heavy Window and Door weather stripping to make sure that no air is leaking around any of them next I insulated the windows and the roof panels with clear plastic I did this by making wooden frames that I then stretched clear greenhouse plastic over them stapled it to the frames and then screwed all of those frames over every single window as well as the roof panels [Music] what this does is it creates an air gap in front of every window and roof panel that acts as a type of insulation the fact that it's plastic also helps to seal any air moving in and out of the building all right so next up is the floor of the greenhouse in the process of doing research for this building I came across a construction Concept in insulation called a Swedish skirt and go ahead and Google that check that out it's a pretty interesting concept where you insulate the area outside of a building on the ground uh that made me kind of realize that how I wanted to lay out the inside of my Greenhouse I ultimately ended up with a raised bed inside the greenhouse and the floor that's surrounding that raised bed is all heavily insulated with two inch styrofoam foil backed foam uh on top of that the area uh behind the bed here is covered in a thick pavers they're about four inches thick I have them left over from a greenhouse that I had made years ago and so the combination of those two things in addition to many layers of construction Grade weed barrier that's below the insulation and above the insulation there is a huge amount of thermal mass and and storage in the ground and on top of that I covered all of the uh the floor that was left over with the leftover Rock from when I was uh jackhammering out this location and so there's this heavy thick layer of gravel that that surrounds the bed so all of this works together to store heat uh when you need it most another feature that contributes to my greenhouse's ability to hang onto heat is the raised bed now there's three specific areas where the the raised bed is able to hold on to heat or to collect Heat the first is that it's made out of Gabby and baskets which are essentially baskets filled with stone and stone has excellent thermal Mass it collects heat holds on to it and then slowly releases it overnight on top of that the inside of the bed where the soil is has a layer of two inch styrofoam insulation so that is an additional way that I'm able to hold on to heat and then a third way that this bed holds on to heat or specifically collects heat is it has two layers of heavy Grade weed barrier on the inside and the outside of the bed and as I demonstrated on the the wall whenever you have black material it collects heat and so the idea for me was that I have this heavy black material that's collecting heat and then you have the stone behind it that's storing the Heat and overall this is something that I think helps in contributing to the heat of the greenhouse of course at this point I have to mention kind of the central concept that I designed the greenhouse around and that is a gat or a ground air heat transfer system essentially it's a geothermal means of heating and cooling the greenhouse so I dug out an area that's about six feet deep underneath the area where I built the raised bed and I laid out hundreds of feet of four inch perforated pipe this gives me access to the warm temperature that's below the surface of the ground it's a constant around 55 degrees and so by means of the control systems and the fans I'm able to bring the greenhouse up to about 55 degrees just with this system by itself and on top of that that the whole Gap is insulated meaning that the soil that I dug out I insulated it all the way around it with two inch styrofoam so those two things by themselves uh contribute immensely to the overall warmth of the greenhouse while I'm talking about the Gat I should also mention another decision that it led me to and that is after I insulated the the roof of the greenhouse I decided to build a drop ceiling made out of R6 insulation foam and what this does is it reduces the amount of air volume in the greenhouse that I need to heat up and it also holds the heat in by means of the drop ceiling another technique that I use to store heat in the greenhouse is water using the thermal mass of water and so here in the front of the bed I have a dozen of black one gallon water bottles black obviously is helpful because it's going to collect more heat and then the water is going to store the heat I also have a two 50 gallon barrels that are part of the watering system for the greenhouse and so all in all I have over 100 gallons of thermal Mass just from water that I am able to use to sore heat that will be slowly released overnight in the greenhouse another obvious method of keeping your Greenhouse a little bit warmer in the winter is by using a heater and this might be a wood stove a gas or electric heater or in my instance a terracotta heater I'm very happy with this particular design that I came up with and uh it does the trick in adding a few additional degrees to the overall temperature of a greenhouse this year I decided to add a foyer to the greenhouse the idea is that it will make it possible for me to prevent as much air escaping the greenhouse that I've worked so hard to save when I'm going in and out of the greenhouse kind of like an airlock in a spaceship now on top of that I tried to make sure that I applied the same Concepts in the foyer that I did in the rest of the greenhouse so the walls are heavily insulated and the walls and the doors are painted black in a hope of collecting and storing Heat the last concept that I wanted to mention when it comes to keeping your Greenhouse warm is the physical location and orientation of the structure try to keep in mind where the Sun is going to be in a low winter Sky it might mean that you need to turn the structure a little bit or move it into a different location on your property on top of that you want to minimize the amount of Shade that's hitting your Greenhouse now it's fall right now and so the trees still have their leaves on them but within the next few weeks all of the leaves are going to be falling off of these trees and there will be hardly any shade hitting my greenhouse and that's what you want you want the most amount of solar energy making it into your Greenhouse so that you can catch it and store it so whatever you can do to minimize the amount of Shade that's hitting your Greenhouse the better if that's trees if you need to move it away from a structure all of these things are very important when it comes to keeping your Greenhouse warm in the winter so there you have it 15 things that I do to keep my Greenhouse warm if you have any questions or comments or want to just let me know what you're working on leave it in the comments section below and uh thanks for watching the video all the way to the end if you like this video you might like these [Music] come on

Channel: Wineberry Hill

Views: 172,622

Keywords: keeping a greenhouse warm in winter, how to heat a greenhouse in winter, greenhouse heating, ways to heat a greenhouse without electricity, how to heat a greenhouse, heating a greenhouse, heat a greenhouse, greenhouse heating ideas, warming a greenhouse, greenhouse heating in winter, greenhouse heating with compost, heating a greenhouse for free, winter greenhouse heating, heating a greenhouse in winter, heat a greenhouse without electricity, solar powered greenhouse heater

Id: g1lCprUWqVE

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2022