The Ultimate Guide to DIY Greenhouses: Pros, Cons, and Everything In Between

are you thinking of building a greenhouse my brother and I have built several over the past few years Each of which having their own unique shape and style we learned a lot over the course of the construction and use of these greenhouses and in this video I want to do an overview of five of the different types of greenhouses that we've built and discuss the pros and cons for each these are a range in the order of simplest to the most in-depth I have more information on each Greenhouse including links to the videos of the build in the description below up first we have our PVC Greenhouse this is 12 by 19 feet built with PVC and it's two by six seaters for the baseboards This Is Anchored by driving some 2x2 boards into the ground and screwing them to the baseboards and one thing you want to keep in mind if you're building this sort of greenhouse is to use UV treated PVC or paint it with some sort of latex paint for that UV protection Pros for this one is it's a simple build it was built by one person and it's very cost effective not a lot of materials go into making this and we had the PVC and most of the lumber on hand before this was built so it wasn't extremely expensive for us to construct this another Pro is that this is angled to be able to shed snow and deal with our snow loads up here and this did really well in the winter the last Pro I had on my list here is the size it's 12 by 19 feet it's very large and especially considering the amount of time and money that went into this thing it's a good deal some cons for this design is whenever you use six mil plastic you're gonna have to help with snow so whenever there's a big snowstorm you have to get outside and get the snow off the plastic luckily the angle of the PVC makes that pretty easy the biggest Con in my eyes of this design is that it's built using PVC it's probably not the most long-term building material and it's probably not the most ideal material to have around your food but for a short-term solution this is a great option you're going to have to replace the plastic on this one every three to five years so you want to keep that in mind and the rigid plastic panels like the corrugated plastic or the twin wall panels which are going to be in design four and five of this list they're going to regulate temperature a little bit better than the six mil that we used in this design we also have some pretty big issues with bugs in this greenhouse and that's probably something you want to keep in mind if you're building this yourself maybe come up with some sort of solution to capture some bugs and keep this place a little cleaner we couldn't really figure anything out this was very early on into our Greenhouse Journey as well so we've learned a lot since then but bugs are something to keep in mind and plan for as well but overall I would say this is a great Greenhouse for what you're getting in terms of size and winter performance for investment of time and money to build it's a great deal and be a good option for you if you're just looking to get started build something to get you up and running and it should give you at least a few years of performance before you really need to start switching materials out or rebuilding up next we have our metal hoop house this is also 12 by 19 feet with the same foundation with cedar base boards and two by twos driven into the ground but instead of PVC pipe this has metal fence conduit that's bent and spaced every almost four feet apart some pros for this is It's a simple build and it's also cost effective because there's not too many materials that go into completing the construction however this fence conduit has gotten a little bit more expensive in recent years we built this five years ago when this was very reasonably priced but ever since then prices and everything's gone up including this metal fence conduit but it's still affordable and another Pro is that metal lasts a very long time so it's still a simple build but you should be able to get a few more years out of this structure as compared into something with like PVC or wood or something else along those lines this greenhouse has lasted three Winters so far so this metal is doing a really good job it's also very big it's 12 by 19 feet which gives you plenty of room to move around in there and have a lot of stuff growing and some cons for the style of greenhouses first of all it's not angled for snow so it's not ideally shaped for shedding snow and even though we haven't had any issues with it so far it's just a little bit harder to get the snow off of it when you go out there to clear it off and the snow kind of sinks in between the metal conduit because it's not angled to slide off of it so it kind of sits there until you get it off of the plastic so I would say that's one of the biggest cons and the rest of the cons that I have are just the result of using the six mil plastic so you have to get snow off of it it's only going to last three to five years there's gonna be a lot of bugs inside of there or at least that's what we've found and six mil plastic doesn't regulate temperature as effectively as rigid plastic panels which I'm going to talk about in my later builds again I think this is a very good greenhouse for the price and what's required to build it this current Greenhouse has made it through three Winters so far structure is showing no signs of slowing down and you just have to keep replacing the plastic as needed and this should last a very long time so number three on the list is my cattle panel Greenhouse this greenhouse is 10 by 16 feet and for a foundation it has four by four anchors and 2x4 baseboards and we bent four cattle panels over to create the structure I also made some step-by-step plans and an interactive material list for this build so if you're interested in that that information will be down in the description as well some pros for this greenhouse is number one it's a simple build it's not extremely hard to put together and cattle panels are very versatile you can arrange your own Greenhouse or set up in a lot of different ways and the versatility of the cattle panels is useful because you can bend them to whatever width or height you need them to be and this gives you a lot of options in how you construct your own Greenhouse some more Pros is how it handles snow load or at least how it's handled it for us so far cattle panels Provide support throughout the whole plastic instead of the first designs where I showed you where there's just a few poles holding up the whole plastic so that really helps with handling snow and we put a ridge beam and ridge beam support in this greenhouse so that has had no issues at all handling the snow load and that should keep these cattle panels from collapsing in on itself and this should be around for quite a few years and a con of this greenhouse is kind of along those same lines I know I just said that it handles winter and snow load really well and it does but you have to put a ridge beam and a ridge beam support in there if you're in a winter like ours at least because if you don't they're probably going to collapse in on itself also these cattle panels have a lot of sharp Jagged edges that will rip holes in the six mil plastic so you want to make sure that you get some Greenhouse tape or some foam rolls to cover all those up because we actually ripped the first sheet of plastic we put on here and that's just a nightmare and a complete waste so make sure you're taking that into account if you're building one of these and then the rest of the cons are in regard to using six mil plastic which is it's only going to last three to five years there's winter maintenance required it's not going to regulate temperatures as well but it's very cost effective you're still getting a pretty big bang for your buck build it very simply or add in some amenities like we did but either way it's going to be a sturdy structure cattle panels are great to build with they should last a long time and again this greenhouse is very roomy and spacious for how much money you put into it and how much time it takes to build so next up is my personal favorite which is the A-frame Greenhouse it's eight feet by eight feet and it's framed with cedar and it has rigid plastic corrugated panels for a foundation we use Square post anchors and metal deck plates to Anchor the structure I also put together a material list with up-to-date pricing for this build we actually bought most of the material for this greenhouse a couple years ago and I went and looked at the prices I paid on my orders versus what the prices are now on my up-to-date material list and some of these materials have gotten really expensive especially the foundation pieces like the posts and the plates they used to be a few dollars each but now they've shot up to around twenty dollars so we paid a lot less for this than the price list would suggest but this thing is built to last and it should last for many years to come and that actually leads me into the first pro of this build and that is that it's built to last so this is built using Cedar and metal and there's only metal in the ground there's no wood in the ground there's also rigid plastic panels so instead of the six mil that has to be replaced every few years this thing should last for a very long time and not only do these panels last for a long time they also regulate temperature very effectively we have some thermometers in here at the end of fall and when it would get below freezing it would stay up into the higher 30s approaching 40 degrees Fahrenheit so it would stay above freezing and even at midday it would only get about 10 degrees hotter than it was outside so it was very good at regulating temperatures and one thing that I'm I'm really a fan of when it comes to an A-frame is its ability to shed snow so this is its first winner and so far the snow has been unable to even stay on there for more than a day or so but this thing has had no issues with winter so far and we built it to be able to shed snow and so far it's doing exactly that another Pro of this style of greenhouse is that it's very easy to collect rain water we made some gutters out of some scrap metal we had lying around and we collect the rain water feed it back into the beds through a tube and it's sort of a self-watering Greenhouse we still have to iron out some Kinks to get the water spread evenly throughout the beds but it's very easy to collect rain water when you pitch a roof like this and use rigid plastic panels and the last Pro that I have on my list is that there's been no bug issues so far so now it's time for cons for this greenhouse and this was a very hard list to put together I love this greenhouse I love how it turned out I'm a fan of everything about it the biggest thing I would say is just overall price whenever you're doing something with cedar it's going to be expensive and then when you factor in the new inflation that's happened over the past couple years everything else is even more expensive including the cedar what we pay for this versus what it costs now to build the same exact structure it's a very big difference so I would say overall price is a con the only other thing I could say for a negative about this is probably that it takes a little bit more skill to build then the first three concepts that I went over but I would say it's doable especially if you have an extra set of hands helping you out and I have a lot of videos about the build of this greenhouse that I'll link in the description below if you're interested and finally number five on my list is our twin wall panel Greenhouse this greenhouse is 12 by 16 feet and we really wanted to build something that would last for as long as possible so a lot of the pros for this one have to do with how well it was built it should last a really long time we poured a concrete foundation and we used these twin wall plastic panels these panels have an extra air layer and that is supposed to dramatically increase its thermal insulation not only that they're also under warranty for 10 years against hail damage weathering and any loss of light transmission so we should be getting huge Harvest of food out of this thing for years to come another Pro of stick framing a greenhouse is you have more control over the dimensions so you can kind of build it to fit whatever area you have or whatever shape or size you need it to be some cons for this greenhouse would be it's very expensive and you're going to be paying for a lot of different materials and there's a lot that goes into building a structure that's this size and it's a pretty in-depth build there's a lot of skills that you need to know and there's lots of skills we had to learn to build this greenhouse like this was our first time ever pouring concrete just keep that in mind it's definitely not impossible and I'm sure a lot of you out there could do this no problem but for us it took a lot of time and energy and learning to get this thing built but we got it done and we made a video about it and I'm going to be making more videos about the build in the future so check those out if you want to see how we built this as of the recording of this video the interior of this greenhouse isn't finished and I'm gonna have to get out there as soon as I can to get all that set up for this year and I'm planning on building some sort of heating system for this greenhouse something that's going to be cheap easy simple and I'm going to be documenting temperatures in here especially once I get that heater set up so that's it for the overview and pros and cons of different styles of greenhouses that we've built and have experience with hopefully this can help you out if you're looking into building your own Greenhouse if you have any questions put them in the comments and I'll be sure to answer those if you like this video please subscribe and I'm going to be doing some more videos about foundations of each type of the greenhouses and pros and cons and going more in depth on that topic and I plan on doing a lot of temperature readings and experiments and updates throughout the year and all these greenhouses so if you would like to see any of those follow along and those videos will be coming out in the coming months

Channel: The North Branch

Views: 2,234,703

Keywords: diy greenhouse, hoop house, green house, greenhouse gardening, mini greenhouse, greenhouse build, high tunnel, greenhouse design, winter greenhouse, diy greenhouse build, diy greenhouse cheap, grow organic, diy greenhouse for winter, diy greenhouse ideas, diy greenhouse mini, diy greenhouse small, diy greenhouse cheap easy, hoop house ventilation, hoop house vs greenhouse, green houses design, greenhouse build cheap, greenhouse building tips, diy, greenhouse, greenhouse diy

Id: a8iQo3b9ARs

Length: 14min 13sec (853 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023