SCHS Greenhouse Build

It works!

As in, I finally got a fan and fitted some ducting and turned it all on- and to my amazement it actually circulates through the system and out the other side! I put the base in almost 3 years ago, so it is fantastic to see that my perforated pipes didn't fill with sand, that the ends of the pipes stayed in the manifolds (blue barrels), etc!

So the system is an RVK fan, 6 inch pvc ducting to a plenum made from a 205litre blue barrel. Then 80mm corrugated and perforated pipe underground- there's 6 pipes on 3 different levels. They go into another blue barrel, which then has a short piece of 6 inch ducting again, and a Y-piece as an outlet. Inlets and outlets have insect screening on! The inlet is up by the peak, and the outlet low down at the opposite end of the greenhouse.

Comparing two broadly similar days (weather-wise). Last week (no fan) with all the windows and door open- the greenhouse hit 40C. With the fan on today it hit 28C. Output air is significantly cooler than the input. Very humid in there at the moment- I'm hoping the SCHS will dry it out slightly but the fan has only been on one day so far!

congrats!
i cant wait to try to build something like this myself

Awesome!!!  Congratulations Charli

A couple of photos to accompany my previous description

Ridiculous greenhouse disco lighting! (And yes, that's a lightup ceramic chicken windchime, on the right hand side)


This is the actual system- big fan and tubing down the manifold (a blue barrel).


Some of the things I'm growing
Lemons


Figs


Coffee beans almost ready!


Unfortunately the peak is only 2.5m tall so I haven't got room for a banana. 2.5m is the limit here without having planning permission (which would have confused the planners utterly, and cost me £600)

Have yet to see if these things will all survive winter (the fig and lemon survived in my old non-heatsink greenhouse so they should be fine!)

That's awesome Charli!  Yours is much greener than my greenhouse.  Looks like your lemon might have the same problem as my orange (Chlorosis)

Citrus are surprisingly hard work Mike! I've got a lime too and they both got chlorosis last year. This years new leaves are looking a lot better though. They're only tiny little plants in pots.

The main green plants in there are tomatoes! They look like they're taking over the world.. a bit overfertilized with all the compost I put into the beds I think! And the dwarf sunflowers that reach the ceiling...

There's also an apricot, a peach (with an awful case of spider mites), a pomegranate, chillis, cucumbers and a melon plant (which is a bit squashed by the 'container tomato' taking up over a square metre). Underplanted with violas and marigolds (tagetes). Its amazing how fast you can fill up your 'big' greenhouse!

Charli Wilson wrote:Its amazing how fast you can fill up your 'big' greenhouse!

That's why they always say you should plan the biggest one you think you can (and then build it 50% larger)!  

I finally got everything installed- such as a bunch of temperature sensors, and a raspberry pi mini computer that monitors the temperature and controls when the fan comes on.

And so i have pretty graphs!

Heat sink vs the same depth in the soil just outside of the insulation- it shows the temperature difference increasing as the spring sun takes effect



The little blue line at the bottom of the graph is when the fan comes on, it shows that this does indeed heat the mass up!



The air putput is on average 3C cooler than the input, with the highest difference being 6C-its transferring plenty of heat to the mass

I'm continually amazed that something I built works!

I need to change the software slightly, I don't make much use of all that heat in the mass at night at the moment- I let the the air temperature drop too low!