The Story of Building my GEOTHERMAL Greenhouse

do you own a kit Greenhouse or are you thinking about buying a kid Greenhouse well I did and I loved it in fact on top of that I figured out a pretty cool pretty cheap way of keeping it heated and I'll talk about that in like two seconds but I should mention I eventually decided to tear down that greenhouse and build a much bigger much more ambitious geothermal Greenhouse here's the story I had a decent measure of success with that little kit greenhouse and the way that I heated it and I should mention it was actually 2K greenhouses built back to back and then placed on top of a raised bed inside the raised bed were barrels of water with basic bucket heaters and thermostats because thermal mass is the name of the game when keeping a greenhouse warm during the winter I had many years of success with that kit greenhouse and heater combination in fact I was able to grow lettuce and kale months beyond what is normally possible in New England Zone 6B and I should mention if you're interested in building that system for your Greenhouse I included links in the description that lay out all the different things you would need to get in order to build that for yourself but when the events of 2020 rolled around like many of you I realized I might need to rethink how well my garden produced and so in the fall of 2021 I made the tough decision to take the old Greenhouse down unfortunately there was a major heavy obstacle in the middle of me being able to do this project you see my property is Solid Rock it's just big rocks with smaller rocks on top of it I have to come up with creative ways of using these rocks just to dig one hole so here was my challenge the old Greenhouse was long and narrow for a reason because the only place I could put a greenhouse was a rock ledge that was long and narrow I couldn't go too far this way too much shade the geography dropped off and so it had to be this spot that I put my Greenhouse but now I wanted to put a footprint of a building that was considerably larger in that same location and so began a month of solid jackhammering [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] pretty early on I realized I wanted to use geothermal to heat and cool the greenhouse but remember all that rock yeah the whole point of geothermal is you bury piping in the ground and so that meant I had many hours agonizing hours of digging with a shovel a pick and a sledgehammer and so I don't have a lot of pictures from that period of time because I was digging hours and hours on end with a shovel a pick and a sledgehammer I'm okay needless to say I had another problem and that is I was running out of room to put stuff I just didn't have a place to put the Rocks I didn't have a place to put the dirt I was running out of a place to stand and so that meant what I had to do was dig the geothermal hole in two sections I dug the front part and then buried the pipe and then dug out the second half underneath it and used that dirt to cover the first part yeah it was a nightmare but once I had the whole dug I could insulate it with two inch R6 insulation foam and then I could install the four inch perforated pipe it had a sleeve on it so that dirt wouldn't go through the perforations and then at this point the real work could start if you've seen any of my other videos about how to keep a greenhouse warm you know I talk a lot about thermal Mass and so when I was designing the greenhouse I wanted to have a raised bed inside the greenhouse that was kind of a focal point of thermal mass that would collect the geothermal and solar heat coming into the structure and it was around that time in December of 2021 that I discovered gabians now if you aren't familiar with what a gabion is more than likely you've probably already seen them most commonly gabians are used along roadways to retain hillsides and so it was a perfect scenario for me because I had a ton of rock that I needed to get rid of as well as I wanted to have a raised bed that would serve as a collection point for all of that heat coming in to the greenhouse and so for uh the latter half of December 2021 I set out to build the Gabby and basket bed inside the greenhouse I also used the leftover wood from the previous Greenhouse to build a shelf so that I could walk around on top of the bed the next thing I did was cover the raised bed inside and out with two layers of heavy duty weed barrier after that I spent a couple weeks pouring the concrete curb that was the footprint of the building so that I had something to bolt the structure to and then I set about laying out the floor I had leftover block from the old Greenhouse that I used to make the floor area when you first enter into the greenhouse and then what I did was I put down uh weed barrier and then I put down two inches of R6 insulation another layer of weed barrier and then three inches gravel any guess where I got all the rocks from as I mentioned in part one I ended 2022 with the ground air heat transfer system installed in the ground where the greenhouse was going to go and when I wasn't working on the greenhouse outside I was scouring the internet for free materials that I could use to build the greenhouse things like wood windows and to my delight I found 16 very large window sashes and three full-size windows that I could use in the arrangement for the south and east facing Windows of the greenhouse I also found giant three foot by three foot three quarter inch thick Plexiglas panels from a big box store that was going out of business and they were using them for holding signage and displays so I was pretty psyched about finding all of those things now the actual Arrangement was kind of tricky to figure out how to arrange all of these different shaped windows and pieces of Plexi into an arrangement that made sense and so my awesome friend that's an architect Josh helped me figure out that arrangement now some of you eagle-eyed viewers might have noticed in the first part that there were two white plastic 50 gallon barrels in the raised bed as I was building it I was going to have those 50 gallon barrels of water in the raised bed and I was going to circulate water from them into an iron radiator that was installed inside of the compost bin just outside the door of the greenhouse I had it all figured out and then I ended up not doing it and the reason is between the geothermal and the solar I was having all of my heating needs met just by those two systems all right so let's talk about the structure another generous friend of mine allowed me to use his extra long Sawmill to cut the structural Timber this made it possible to cut the structural Timber as well as the Sill but when I hauled all of that lumber over here to my house I didn't want to be crawling around on the ground there was potential snow storms coming and try to be marking out cutting to length of these big pieces of wood and so what I did was in the widest part of my driveway I built an improvised workbench that was 25 feet long out of pallets and in the middle of that workbench I installed my chop saw and this made it for possible for me to do repeatable angles and so all the different pieces of lumber would match up once I hauled them up the hill it also made it easier to have the lumber up off the ground and I could very carefully cut all of the different mortise and Tenon during this period of time I also preemptively cut down half a dozen Oaks that I thought potentially could either shade or threaten the structure of my Greenhouse in the next 10 years once I was able to get the sill bolted down to that curb that made up the footprint of the structure things started happening a lot faster and in no time the bones of the structure were up and I was able to get the walls in place and get it basically dried in [Music] the other thing I was able to work on during that period of time was I made a lot of pallet wood shingles that I used for both the roof and the walls once the walls of the greenhouse were dried in I could do a lot of different things I went online I found a lot of free clean dry styrofoam that I packed the north and west walls full of Styrofoam for the insulation value also covered all of the walls that don't have Windows in them with heavy duty weed barrier that's black so that it would absorb heat from the Sun uh since then I've also added a heated water line I've added over 100 gallons of water storage inside the greenhouse next to the main raised bed I created an additional raised bed for strawberries and I also have a wall of buckets with food grade buckets for strawberries as well additionally on the back wall I installed a workbench that I can use for potting it also has a grow light hanging over it so I can use it to get seedlings started all of the plants inside the greenhouse as well as some of the raised beds outside of the greenhouse are watered by means of drip irrigation fed from the 100 gallons of water storage that's inside the greenhouse foreign last but not least I decided to add a vestibule outside of the entrance of the greenhouse so that I wasn't letting all that nice heated air out during the winter by going in and out of the door during the the summer I just usually leave the door open and that's why I have that cool bug curtain magnetic bug curtain that prevents bugs from coming in and out of the greenhouse as well now that answers all of the questions that I could think of but I'm sure there are some questions that you're probably wondering maybe the most important question is how well does this work and I'm happy to tell you that it works incredibly well on a nice sunny day in the middle of the winter maybe a really cold winter day I've had days where it was 55 degrees warmer inside the greenhouse than it was outside and so I mean come on living in the northeast of the United States that's a pretty big deal but it shines also in the summer I had an old greenhouse and on an 80 degree day it would be 130 degrees inside the greenhouse not so with a ground air heat transfer greenhouse because that cool air is getting moved out of the soil below and below your bed or below the surface and brought up into the greenhouse and so there have been you know days the hottest days during the summer when it's like 95 or 98 Degrees it's only a few degrees warmer inside the greenhouse you know if it's 98 degrees outside maybe it's 99 maybe it's 100. and so that's a pretty big deal as well some of that has to do with the ground air heat transfer some of that has to do with the orientation of the structure the shade that I get in the late afternoon by Design from the deciduous trees around all of these things add up to the success of this particular greenhouse and so it's not just one thing that makes your Greenhouse successful it's a lot of different combined systems that you have to kind of think about did I miss something was there something I should have talked about that you have questions about I'd love to know because I answer every comment in question and so let me know in the comments section below um thank you to all 10 of you that made it to the end of this video you are amazing and you keep me motivated and like I always say if you like this video you might like these [Music]

Channel: Wineberry Hill

Views: 453,576

Keywords: geothermal greenhouse, DIY greenhouse, passive solar greenhouse, geothermal greenhouse technology, Greenhouse, Passive solar greenhouse design, Geothermal greenhouse setup, Geothermal greenhouse, Geothermal Greenhouse 101, how to build a greenhouse, how to build an earth battery, geothermal gardening, geothermal greenhouse benefits, build a geothermal greenhouse, geothermal greenhouse design, year-round greenhouse, Cool greenhouse ideas, diy geothermal greenhouse

Id: J8rL71zWf_c

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2023