Revolutionize Your Gardening: Build a Passive Solar Greenhouse like a Pro!

welcome to the expert level Greenhouse this is my hybrid passive solar Greenhouse so the reason I call it a hybrid passive solar is that it's not totally passive I use electricity but we're off grid here so I use very little but this is sort of your ultimate Greenhouse as far as season extension I can get four seasons in here with very little inputs this is a lot more of an expensive greenhouse and it has some really interesting features that we'll get into we'll talk about on the outside so it's essentially a geothermal greenhouse and when we go inside I'll explain more of what that actually looks like our walls are almost an R40 they're somewhere between an R35 to 30 to R40 kind of depends on how you measure things exactly but I'll break that down later when we talk about the specific construction process of this greenhouse we've got a double layer poly uh just like the the last Greenhouse but it's fastened a lot different on this structure because this structure is built like a house essentially um so we've got a blower between that um we're framed on to a secondary building so this greenhouse is connected to a garage where I also have a workshop and an office so it's also the main hub of our Homestead it's a very important structure here on The Homestead it's kind of at the center of the action all of our off-grid power systems are in the garage on this but we're not going to talk about the garage or my office in this video we're just going to talk about the greenhouse but it is framed onto another building and that's important to understand um we are 42 feet long we're 20 feet wide and we're 28 feet tall in the center at the high point we have uh Rafters that are built with uh 2 by 12 lvls that are spaced four feet apart and there's four foot purlins on there as well and we've also got some interesting flashings and Roofing features on this greenhouse that are that are important I want to mention the aspects of this greenhouse and sort of the terminology so this wall here on Apostle solar Greenhouse is referred to as the knee wall though on this specific design it's a lot higher than your knee but it's called a knee wall this up here is the face of the greenhouse this is a rake wall and then on the inside is the rear wall and that rear wall is what's butted up against the garage shop office whatnot this greenhouse has a six foot deep climate battery with two layers of pipe and when we go inside we'll talk about that further I have Windows on all sides these are innotech tilt and turn windows I have Windows on all sides but I have less windows on the west side so that in the summer time when this when the sun is set in the west it's actually cooler in there than it is outside which is a really neat feature and we have um standard 2x6 framing with rock wool insulation and then we have an outsellation a layer of insulation on the outside of the structure as well which is a one and a half inch Ico which is a sort of a glass It's Made of Glass but it's an R9 and then we've got some bridging in between with Vapor Berry and whatnot but total we get to almost an R40 wall so some of the the flashings we did on this were all really custom and there's a square piece of flashing here that is a really brilliant one we we use uh the roofing we're using on the sides here is the same Roofing we use on the garage and it'll be the same on the house it's called a standing seam or prologue it's uh from West forms metals and it's a great product because the the the screws aren't exposed and so it's really good for Winters where you have a lot of freezing and thawing but this piece of flashing up here is very crucial because it covers the channel lock which is holding this poly and keeps water and ice from getting into the channel lock so that way it moves all the water off and I don't have any water compromising the the way that channel lock is is attached to the structure which is very important on my last Greenhouse that I my last pass of solar Greenhouse in Kelowna I didn't do a very good job of that and it's and it's something that will have to be addressed on it eventually but this the way we did this flashing makes it so that water never gets on the inside of the channel lock so before we go inside to just point out a few things on the exterior we still haven't painted this greenhouse so it's we're going to paint it to this the same color of our house which is going to be sort of a dark gray with uh with Trims and stuff like that but we're finished with Hardy Plank and 7 8 corrugated steel which is a theme I'm using a lot of on the property for we use it on the other Greenhouse as well I've also built these um small little overhang roofs where I've got some tool storage here I've got my hose mounted there we've got an uh two foot overhang with the roof and the the way we've laid this roof out was was really important actually to how this greenhouse functions and you can see if you just come over here a little bit you can see how the snow is building up and it's great because this just Falls there naturally and I don't have to do anything so I don't have to shovel it away from the building or anything and because we have a steel skirting that goes around the base it keeps the building dry so that was a very important feature this is what I call the nose of the greenhouse this sticks out above my knee wall this comes out one foot and so all of my water and precipitation drips down there and I have drainage in around this building like you would any other home but I might eventually put a rain gutter along there just so that I can control that water and potentially Harvest it more later because this structure does shed a lot of water all right so coming into the greenhouse you can see it's quite a a large space basically this this greenhouse is divided up into three areas so one third of the greenhouse in its length is dedicated to this area where I have concrete pavers down it's kind of a work area it's actually at the moment an area that my kids play in pretty much every day my son's got his trucks everywhere and but it's where I'll do a lot of potting up in the spring uh any any any work that needs to be done so I got this kind of work Lounge area if you will here the other third is the growing area for field crops so we've got two foot high raised beds just like in the hot house I've got four of them they're four feet wide by 12 feet long and then I've got one that's underneath the deck so that's my growing area there I've also got another small raised bed here and then I've got a nursery area above in its current setup this is kind of a lounging we're kind of hanging out in here we're not we're not growing a lot of crops so I do still have some tomatoes that are just hanging on and this greenhouse is a lot warmer than outside so keep in mind there's no active heat in this greenhouse whatsoever it's minus four Celsius outside which is about 18 fair or uh uh is it no it's about 20 Fahrenheit and we come inside and it's 15 degrees Celsius or 60 degrees Fahrenheit so that's no heat right now the climate battery is running and the climate battery in this greenhouse is a lot more it's a lot bigger than the other one but so we've got these these areas in thirds Hangout work area growing area Nursery area up on the deck so I have mobile movable shelves that I can move around and my wife's got kind of furniture hanging around here we had a party in here not too long ago it's a space that we spend a lot of time in in the winter and I'm not growing a lot of crops and so it just becomes kind of a play area hang it area I've even got a suntan Zone up on the collar ties there there's that little blanket up there because in this greenhouse there's three levels of temperatures and it's it's quite significant so uh right now it's 15 degrees down here it's about 16 17 degrees up on the deck and up at the very top where the climate battery is right now at this very moment it's 20 degrees Celsius and so it's taking air that's 20 degrees Celsius and it's sucking it down and distributing it into this large array of piping underneath us and it's coming out on the other corner at about 10 degrees Celsius so it's dumping about 10 degrees Celsius of heat in the ground on a sunny day on if it was really sunny right now it would be about 30 degrees in here at this point at the deck would be about 35 and maybe about 40 up there and it would be taking that heat and dumping about 20 degrees of it in the ground and then that air comes up so let me explain this climate battery um better because this one is is quite Advanced so this Foundation is is uh the foundation of a house essentially there's a two foot footing on the bottom and then there's a 10 inch foundation wall on top of that and then there's three inches of rigid insulation on the outside buried underground that's covered in flashings and uh dimple board and things like that and that's buried and then it's filled up with compacted sand but what's different about this one than the last one is that this climate battery has two layers of pipes so with our with our air intake here we come down from a 10 inch air duct to a 12 inch inline fan it's a it's an 880 CFM fan blowing air down into a 12 inch SDR sewer pipe and that's a manifold that goes all along the 16 feet on the inside of this Foundation the greenhouse is 20 feet outside to outside on the inside of the foundation it works out to be about 16 feet and that's how long that SDR pipe is and then there's another SDR pipe down there 12 inches and there's two layers of Big O pipe in that and so every six inches there's a four inch hole on two layers so when that SDR pipe was laying down on the ground we drilled four inch holes and the the first row of pipes basically hugged the very bottom of our the floor that we're standing on which is about six feet of compacted sand and that we ran that all across a pipe every six inches then that got buried in sand and packed and layered and we we layered and packed with water and a and a gas powered Packer every three inches and then we packed up about a few feet of sand and then we did the next layer and so the next layer of pipes came out and those ones are really only maybe about a foot and a half from where we are but the the other ones on the bottom are a lot deeper so what this did was it gave a more of a distributed area to evenly disperse heat amongst the ground warming it up faster and it's it's quite amazing how much this climate battery can warm up quickly because of it and I'm monitoring it now because I I monitor my temperature up there I monitor the air that comes out of the climate battery and I monitor the temperature in here I this greenhouse I have three points of measure that I'm that I'm constantly monitoring and tracking the data on but the climate battery is essentially if you imagine it as a flywheel and the bigger the climate battery the heavier or larger the flywheel and so the flywheel spins and with momentum and as the temperature cools or warms up the flywheel speeds up or slows down but that momentum carries you so the really interesting thing about this greenhouse is on a warm day like we've had today at least warm in here is that this greenhouse will charge up this climate battery a few degrees and that will carry for about up to 48 hours and what it means is that at night time if it gets really cold and the temperature in here drops I'll keep the climate battery running so the air that's coming out of the climate battery right now is 10 degrees Celsius the air temperature in here can drop down I think last night it went down well it didn't go down below 10 last night but but uh some nights when it's been minus 20 degrees Celsius outside it's gone down to two degrees in here so if I keep my climate battery running that air temperature is steady it's a steady 10 degrees so it could be 30 degrees in here Celsius and the air coming out is 10 degrees maybe it might rise up to 13 or something at that point um but then if the air temperature drops and I keep the climate battery running I can keep the the Ambient Air Temperature in here close to the Ambient Air Temperature of the ground which is that is the really cool feature about this this climate battery and so in a nutshell that's how the clamp battery works now let me talk about some of the other features in here so we have our Rafters which are lvl's manufactured Lumber and this is these are very long Rafters they're 20 they're 28 feet uh end to end it's also 28 feet high here so it's a very long span and they're four feet apart and I've got purlins every four feet there as well and then we've also got these features called a collar tie that's this this this piece of wood that connects the rafter to the structure of the main building that just kind of ties it all together but it also gives me the ability to hang things from it which is very useful when you're gardening when you want to verticalize things I I mean I'm making swings for my kids and hammocks and things like that in here as well but it just gives me a lot of options that I can basically verticalize anything in this greenhouse now if we look up top our climate battery runs almost to the very top of the greenhouse and it starts with a 10 inch pipe and then it couples down to an eight inch pipe and then it ends with a six inch pipe and we built this in 10 foot uh one of them we did 20 foot pieces but we basically um we oh we carried this up with ladders actually and then got it onto some some uh brackets and then I'll talk about that more in the construction phase of this but um so our climate battery is taking the hottest air and sucking it down in the ground in the summertime the climate battery can't take enough heat it's just too hot so above the climate battery air ducts are the exhaust vents and there's six of these Vents and they are 16 inches wide and they're six feet long and we've built them out of Ico insulation with um with steel flashing basically and we built these Vents and the vents also have those automated uh vents that we saw in the hot house that have a gas chamber that with heat they open so those vents in the summertime they pretty much are just open all the time and all I have to do to vent this greenhouse almost instantly is let those vents open and then come in here and just open these windows like this and I'll just go and I'll open all the windows and I mean really in the summer they're just staying open all the time but in the spring and the fall is where you're going to fluctuate where you know you want it all sealed up at night but then you want it vented by at least 9 or 10 AM because it gets too hot so those exhaust vents are unbelievable how quickly air just moves out of here and I leave the climate battery running for a good chunk of the summer it's probably turned off by late June because it's just you can only dump so much heat in the ground so it probably stays off until early September and then I'll turn it back on in September and start charging this ground up going into the winter it's kind of getting the momentum of the flywheel going into the winter so that as I go into November I'm still holding heat from the summer in here and it's amazing how much that'll carry you into the winter and it just didn't get cold in here for long at all so that is some of the the the the features there um you'll notice that on the walls here I've got this plasticky looking stuff this is called an FRP it's a fiberglass reinforced plastic this is something you see in commercial kitchens and places like that and we have the edges all done with it the ledges on the windows are all finished with it the the idea with it is that because this is such a high humid environment it's often I mean right now the humidity is 63 in here I've actually been running a dehumidifier in here now because it's been up to 80 percent which is nice when it's warm but it really sucks when it's cold because then your temperature just feels that much colder and that's why my tomatoes are starting to look a little Haggard but we are mid-December so you know I don't really care if my tomatoes survive much more at this point I feel like I've got my value out of them but we've got these frps on the walls and up here it was quite a bit of work to do all this but it basically just keeps this structure drier it keeps the water out of the walls all right so just going on a little bit more about the features of this greenhouse again knee wall face rake walls and the rear wall the rear wall is butted up against my garage so right through here I have my workshop behind there is my single car garage for my car and then over there I've got my office and this deck is how I get to all of it this wall is really important and we had to do some interesting things with it and uh what we did was we treated it like almost like um the exterior so we did Vapor Barrier on this side when we framed this we did Vapor Barrier on this side and we actually did Tyvek on the other side of that insulated wall and the idea there is that because there's a wood stove in the garage eventually I'll have forced air hydronics in here uh but I don't have it yet um we have that Tyvek so that with that stove warms up it will kind of dry out the other side and all the humidity stays in here and so that was an uh something that we felt was the right thing to do we also have a thermal Mass wall so this is all a concrete this is about six feet high off the ground down there which is also thermal mass and in the winter time the sunlight actually penetrates that wall so it's it touches that wall so it's another element of thermal Mass on top of the climate battery now just wrapping up some some thoughts on the the deck the deck on this is really crucial it allows me to verticalize because I have so much High area in this greenhouse I want to maximize the square footage of areas that I can use that's why I have my grow beds down below and the deck is the nursery nursery area but it's also at least a few degrees warmer up there than it is down here so it makes it better for our nursery and I also use these wire shelves to put my Nursery Flats on that even gets higher and I get a warmer area and I actually get more light because I'm above everything else I get more light all the way around and that's what's probably the one of the most important features of a greenhouse like this and why they call them a passive solar Greenhouse is that the face and knee wall is orientated straight to the South so in the winter time the sun Rises and sets within the the scope of the face of the greenhouse meaning that I get light coming in all the time in the winter from morning till night in the summertime not so much because in the summertime the sun is rising in the Northeast and it's setting in the Northwest and so it's actually a good thing because it means that this greenhouse is cooler than say that high tunnel out there in the summer because it actually gets a little bit less light still gets all the light it needs to grow a crop successfully but you get a break from the heat that's why this wall here the windows are arranged a bit different and there's kind of more square footage of windows down here than there is on this wall and on the Western Wall here on the corner I have no windows because when my son sets down over here I don't want it coming in the greenhouse it gets too hot and so because this wall here there's no windows right here and this is where the sun sets in the West about four o'clock which is the hottest time of the day in the summer this is all in shade so the sun's over here this whole thing casts shade in here and this greenhouse is mostly in shade at the hottest time of the day that's a very important feature so let's talk about the performance of this greenhouse because I can essentially keep this greenhouse warm year round if once I have my forced air units with hydronics which the lines are right there it'll all be piped in soon enough I'll be able to keep it warm effortlessly year round but it's not necessarily needed to keep this greenhouse I don't need to keep this at 18 degrees Celsius at night time if I was doing commercial production there would be a reason for that but I'm not doing commercial production so I don't need that I can let this greenhouse cool down I'll let it get down to five degrees Celsius I don't like it to get much below that but I can let it get there and I've got lemongrass in here still I got tomatoes in here I got cucumbers and they're they're alive but because it never gets cold in here my soil is always going to stay at a certain a certain level of warmth and I could essentially seed anything any time of the year and grow stuff I could start seeding lettuce if I wanted to right now though it's not really advisable this to seed before the winter solstice it's better to see seed after but I could seed anything any time of the year and so that's great and that's worth a lot to some degree but is it worth what this greenhouse is actually worth it's debatable I'll let you decide but this greenhouse costs somewhere between fifty to eighty thousand dollars I don't know the exact cost and it's a bit nebulous because what do I count on the other side because it's framed to the garage in Greenhouse so it's it's a little bit tricky to split the costs and so I say it's somewhere between fifty to eighty thousand dollars now that does get me the ability to grow year-round fairly effortlessly but not that much different from the other Greenhouse which is about A fifth or an eighth of the cost of this one but what it does get me is I get a nursery in here I get an area that I can hang out I mean I'm sprouting my chicken feed in here at the moment my kids play in here we hang out on The Hammocks I sun tan up there there's a huge element of Lifestyle built into this which is up for you to decide whether it's worth an extra forty to seventy thousand dollars so it's hard to say all right so that's it for this greenhouse tour so if you guys want a detailed more in-depth version of this head over to from the field dot TV if you're not a member you can sign up for free for seven days if you just want to check it out you can watch the whole series if you want so we did a full length video for each greenhouse and the only thing that we added that you didn't see in this version is I went through the materials in in more detail and I covered the construction process from beginning to end of each Greenhouse so if you want to see that head over to from the field dot TV if you guys like this video smash the like share it with your friends and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already check out my site from thefield.tv it's where I post all my Vlogs and the vast majority of all my content alright guys we'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Off-Grid with Curtis Stone

Views: 36,738

Keywords: Curtis Stone, From The Field, Urban Farmer, Gardening, Greenhouse, Passive Solar Greenhouse, Channel Lock, Homesteading, Mountain Homestead, Climate Battery

Id: von7IxA7uQc

Length: 26min 21sec (1581 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023