Coincidentally, I just spent this weekend with Jerome Osentowski, the premier designer of thermal-battery greenhouses in the world. He lives at 7000' in Colorado and grows papayas and bananas in an (mostly) unheated greenhouse. They do get good sun there, but the key is that in the soil are runs of 4-inch perforated pipe laid out in rows that all feed to a central manifold. The manifold, via a big pipe like a chimney, pulls in hot air from the top of the greenhouse and runs it through the soil pipes. At night, the fan keeps running but now the soil pipes are warmer than the air, so warm air is fed from the soil to the greenhouse air. This fixes both of the big drawbacks to greenhouses: they get too hot during the day, so instead of venting off (losing) that hot air, this puts the heat into the soil, keeping the high temps moderated. And greenhouses can chill at night to even colder than outside from radiative heat loss, but this pumps that daytime heat back into the greenhouse air. Hence the bananas in Colorado winter.
Jerome's website is
http://crmpi.org and he is also writing a book on these greenhouses. Interesting aside: he's been hired by rich doomers to build enormous thermal-battery greenhouses so they can grow food after the supposed big crash.
So, east of the cascades--do you get reasonable sun (do your daytime greenhouse temps get to 60 or above) to use a thermal battery instead of a lot of wood? The problem I see here with a rocket stove is that if you run the flue pipe underground, the soil may get so cold that the stove won't draw properly. Not sure about that, but it's a concern. Insulating the n and even the e wall of the greenhouse would help too.
Jerome is a genius.
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