How To Heat A Green House Naturally

oh it's raining out there like crazy but at least at least it's warm in here what is going on guys welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the in my Gardener Channel in today's episode I'm really excited to be talking about how to heat a greenhouse without a heater so let's go [Music] so when it comes to having a greenhouse one of the most expensive things to actually have in a greenhouse is not the greenhouse itself it's actually the heat believe it or not the greenhouse industry actually spends about 70 percent of its operating cost on heat and that is absolutely way too much of a cost for me to incur so I am someone that does not want to spend all that money I'd much rather have the greenhouse and try to heat it naturally if possible and so in this episode I'm going to give you guys a ton of ways that you can kind of use to your benefit to hopefully warm your Greenhouse up now it won't be as warm as say heating it with like an actual furnace that is something that is you know a very expensive cost to have and having this greenhouse here is something that is a luxury but I think there's ways we could at least keep it warm enough to where we could start seeds right now it's like I said it's raining out it's about 45 degrees but in the greenhouse it's about 53 degrees now a week ago before this warm spell even occurred the days we're in about the mid 40s or so low 30s or so but the nighttime temperatures were in 10 to 20 degrees and so despite the fact that the nighttime temperatures were 10 to 20 degrees the inside temperature in this greenhouse never even got close to that and that's because of the things we're going to talk about so it allows us to actually grow earlier because if we can get into the greenhouse and start some plants and keep the greenhouse above that freezing point above 32 degrees you can start plants and that means you can actually get an earlier start to your garden you don't have to be running expensive grow lights in your house you don't have to be worrying about space and things like that because once you've got a thousand square feet you can basically do whatever you want and start as early as you want as long as the temperature allows for it all right so the first thing you're going to need in order to know if it's safe to plant in your greenhouse and to know if the steps you're taking are even really effective you're going to need some type of thermometer now I love this because this is known as a temp stick not a sponsor just something that we're using because it'll allows us to check the temperature of the greenhouse anywhere in the world it syncs up to an app and then it actually syncs the app up to Wi-Fi so this is transmitting the temperature 24 hours a day it gives us basically minute by minute updates if we want right on our cell phone or a tablet wherever we're at in the world and so that is awesome for us because if I need someone to come check on the greenhouse or you know if I'm sleeping I can set alerts and they can actually come right to my phone and that really helps me to know you know oh the temperature is below freezing I need to take emergency measures but as long as this kind of is functioning it gives me a really good reading of the high temperatures and the low temperatures in the greenhouse and that's really important to kind of knowing the steps you should be taking because as you get later into the season and things are getting warmer you need to test you need to take less and less action because the temperatures are already going to be warmer and the greenhouse is going to be hopefully trapping that heat as we'll talk about and so you don't need to do nearly as much to really worry about it but knowing the highs and lows is really important and so a thermo a thermometer definitely comes in handy but you don't even need one of these Wi-Fi ones just get like a basic hanging one if you want but a thermometer is important all right now the next thing you can do is you can actually use what's called a solar heat sink now you can be using what's called thermal Mass to heat your Greenhouse that's what most of this episode is going to be all about is generating thermal mass for your Greenhouse now what is thermal Mass well thermal mass is essentially any type of object that can absorb heat from the Sun and that radiation from the sun will warm up that object it'll hold the Heat and then it will release the heat throughout the night and so it creates what's called equilibrium if the greenhouse normally would have been 40 degrees but you have an object that's 50 degrees it will release that heat out until it hits about you know that equilibrium point right whatever that equilibrium is imagine you having your house being 70 degrees you take a small cup of 112 20 degree water to make coffee or tea with well that that cup of water won't do diddly squat to heat your house because your house is so large what it will do is the coffee will cool down it'll release that heat it will release the heat somewhere but it creates equilibrium and what is that equilibrium well it's about room temperature so your coffees your coffee your tea is going to get only so cold but it's not going to heat the room up that much right that's the thermal Mass that's the the amount of heat that can be released and so in a greenhouse like this we're in a thousand square feet it doesn't matter if you're in a greenhouse of 10 square feet or even 10 000 square feet you can still be using some of these things we're talking about to not only warm your Greenhouse up but hopefully get it to the point where it's warm enough that you have enough heat that you don't have to heat your Greenhouse with say like something like propane or gas alright so the first form of a kind of a solar heat sink that we're going to talk about that generates thermal mass for your Greenhouse are water tanks now water tanks can be very reliable at holding heat because water is actually an incredible conductor of heat and so what we're going to be doing is uh because we don't actually have these in the greenhouse I'm gonna have Taylor our our videographer and video editor kind of throw these in for me so it's going to kind of challenge Taylor so I'm not going to move but we're going to basically stage this greenhouse as if it had it in you know basically had the these things in there so we're going to add some water tanks now the general rule of thumb is you want about five gallons of water to heat about one square foot of greenhouse and so because this is a two uh 1 000 square foot Greenhouse we're gonna need roughly about 200 gallons of water now will that heat it up exponentially no it won't it'll only heat the greenhouse as much as the water is warmed now what we can do is we can actually paint the barrels black that's another thing we can do to kind of increase the amount of radiation because black absorbs heat more than white which reflects heat right so the water is going to hold on to the heat from the black painted outside and that way you can increase the temperature that much more to give you that much more kind of thermal Mass to be released throughout the night and so we're going to put some kind of 50 gallon drums over here and that's going to be great so we need about 200 gallons of water and that will raise the temperature in the greenhouse about three degrees so if the temperature was about 30 degrees normally it's going to hopefully be right around 33 degrees with those barrels now the next thing we can do is we can fill this up with a bunch of plants now plants are a great thermal Masters these big pots of soil that we're gonna be planting lettuce in these smart pots are black which helps absorb heat but they're also filled with soil there's a lot of moisture that absorbs into the soil and so you have to remember like when your garden gets warm your garden actually will release that heat throughout the night so Tomatoes potatoes love those nice warm nights because uh the the Sun beats down on the soil warms that soil up and then even when it's like April May June time when the nighttime temperatures are kind of like in the 50s and 60s the soil might be like 65 or 70 degrees and it kind of radiates that warmth up and keeps the tomato plants warm in the early season and so plants in the greenhouse are going to do the exact same thing so the more plants you have the better now it is kind of a catch-22 because what came first the chicken or the egg right what came first the plants or the ability to plant plants right so you want to start with things that are cold hardy start with things that don't mind the cold weather first like we're starting lettuce lettuce is going to survive just fine I wouldn't start a tomato in here because we can't get we can't guarantee that the temperatures are going to stay above freezing with the current systems we have in place but as we get more plants in here more cold hardy plants the warmer it should be because of all that thermal mass and so plant we're going to put a bunch of plants over here just a bunch of them and uh I don't know how many Taylor's gonna throw in but we'll see a bunch of plants and basically those are a great way to hold on to heat and release that throughout the night and then the final form of kind of thermal mass in kind of the form that you can kind of physically put inside of a greenhouse is actually gravel now gravel is not the choice of everyone for us it is because this gravel it's a stone it's a crushed gravel and you don't have we don't even need to put this in post because it's actually in here but gravel is a stone and stone will hold on to to heat really really well imagine like a brick house right what we always find I lived in an Old Brick House it was about a about 105 years old and it was unbearable in the summer because the the summer heat would just heat up that brick super hot and then we'd have to basically open up all the windows we had to turn on an attic fan suck all that heat out because the brick would just radiate that heat into the house and you just basically be sleeping in a sauna it was terrible but stone is the equivalent to basically brick and so it's going to hold on to that heat and for us because it's in the greenhouse here it acts as a really good floor for us to to walk on so we're not stepping in mud and stuff as the as the season kind of picks up so we put Stone in here and stone is a wonderful conductor of that heat and because we have so much of it we have about three inch layer over top of the thousand square feet we have here so we're talking a really a good amount of gravel in this greenhouse and that's going to act again as a thermal Mass source so all those things combined are kind of ways for you to help kind of heat your Greenhouse with the help of the Sun but now we're going to talk about some other things like the design of the greenhouse now the shape of the greenhouse actually will make a huge difference with how much heat it will trap you see there's actually uh several different types of greenhouses there's what's called a gabled roof Greenhouse there is a arched greenhouse and then there's kind of a Gothic style Greenhouse kind of a hybrid of the two and what you want to go with especially if you're in Michigan if you live in a place that gets really cold and you want to trap a lot of heat you want to go with something with a peak having a peek in the greenhouse not only will help with snow load it's actually more load-bearing because the snow will Slough off the off of the the steeper angle on the roof rather than having an arch on it but it will also do a much better job of trapping heat why is that well it all has to do with What's called the Greenhouse Effect and essentially the angle of the roof will bring sun in and that sun once it comes in will bounce around and so that once the sun is bouncing around that actually is what's trapping the the sun's energy inside the greenhouse but not just that the heat inside the greenhouse which is energy will also bounce around and a really cool trick that you can do at home to actually visualize this is take a square cup put a marble inside that square cup and then roll it around what happens well the the marble simulates the the heat energy right the energy particles from the Sun the warmth right the warmth is going to bounce off of the flat sides of the square cup but compare that to a circular cup which is basically the equivalent of having an arched Greenhouse you swirl that around that energy particle that heat the marble is just going to swirl around and come in contact with the uh the edge of the greenhouse longer or the edge of the cup and that is what happens in a greenhouse is when that sunlight comes in it's going to warm it up but it's going to release it very quickly because there's more surface area coming in contact with that heat there's less room for it to kind of bounce around and so that angle is really really important to trapping the Heat all right so now we're going to talk about using snow to heat your Greenhouse now that seems like the biggest oxymoron that has ever existed however you have to remember that snow is water which is a wonderful conductor of heat but also it's frozen meaning that it has to be at or below 32 degrees Fahrenheit and so if you've got snow on the outside of your Greenhouse what I like to do is I like to pile snow up on the walls as much as you can be careful not to pile too much obviously snow can be really heavy but the fact that I can pile it up onto my Greenhouse say three to four feet high allow us there to actually be kind of a protective wall almost like an igloo and that's because the outside temperature can be much much colder but what it's doing is it's actually working on cooling down that snow first before it starts to cool down the inside of the greenhouse so this little thin layer of of plastic here doesn't do a whole lot with keeping the greenhouse uh you know warm it traps some heat but it basically relies on all those systems like I talked about to keep the greenhouse warm and so this little layer of plastic doesn't do a whole lot but having a bunch of snow on the outside basically will act as a protective barrier to that cold on the outside from getting on the inside and that can make a huge difference especially in the earlier season with keeping your Greenhouse basically that much warmer now again the outside temperature might be 18 degrees and the inside temperature might be like 25 degrees right but some protection is better than no protection all right so the greenhouse portion is done so now we're talking about the last part to heating a greenhouse and this is actually a very reliable way to heat your greenhouse and that is using geothermal now geothermal is basically as it implies we're using Geo which is Earth and thermal which is heat and we're actually going to be heating the greenhouse using the earth now this has been done for hundreds of years but the way that you can actually do this is by putting your Greenhouse into a hill or by digging a basically digging the greenhouse deeper now you've probably heard of What's called the frost line now the frost line is how far down the frost can penetrate Frost here in Michigan that's about four feet and so if you can Dig Down Deeper than four feet you reach soil that is thawed and the nice thing is with thawed soil is you know that it's above 32 degrees because it's what's thawed so it's actually going to be heating your Greenhouse From Below up above and so that's a great way to eat your Greenhouse I'll see if I can post uh there's a gentleman I believe in I want to say Arkansas or maybe Missouri that grows Citrus Citrus with no heat whatsoever using just the natural berm of soil that he's dug into and just has the the greenhouse facing at a perfect angle to trap all that heat from the Sun and then the soil is dug out below and basically he makes this almost like uh this you know ecosystem that the sun warms up the soil the soil is deep enough to be geothermal and the two just co-exist perfectly to where you can grow Citrus even in places like Missouri I think it's Missouri but I'll see if I can post links to his videos in the description box it's absolutely incredible but you can do that here like I said we don't have this luxury because the hill that we're on is uh is not quite steep enough to do that but by kind of putting it into the hill we'll allow you to have all of that heat basically butting up against the greenhouse now again that Hill is kind of you know it can block some sunlight right so make sure it's positioned right but if you can get some nice Southern sun exposure into the greenhouse trap that heat and maybe have the back of the greenhouse being like a west facing kind of a west facing Hill or maybe a North facing Hill to really trap some of that heat from the Earth and the Sun that's a pretty amazing combination and the final form of kind of using kind of geothermal in a way is kind of just attaching it to your house now your house is not really geothermal necessarily but a lot of people have what's called an all seasons room and that all seasons room is basically just a sun room that's attached to their home and so any heat that their home loses will just kind of seep into the sun room and so that's another great way that you can heat your Greenhouse now the only other thing I would say is that it's not very efficient obviously if you know if you've got a window open or a door a French door open and you're basically just heating your Greenhouse with your home you're going to be losing a ton of money in heat so not really the best best method to be using but if you can just attach it to the side of your house that can be absolutely amazing because the sun again is going to warm up the side of your house and your house is also warm and those two heat sources leeching into your Greenhouse can be an amazing combination of keeping your Greenhouse warm throughout the winter so there you go there's all the methods to warming your Greenhouse naturally I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you learned something new as always this is Luke from the in my Gardener Channel reminding you to grow bigger take care guys bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 239,568

Keywords: MIgardener, vegetable gardening, organic gardening

Id: zIbGx5JdLho

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2023