Hello
French newbie here both in greenhouses and RMH.
Just moved from an unnice foreign country to southwest of France and bought a relatively big piece of land.
My wife (asian origin) and myself would both like to build a large greenhouse. From her side to cultivate asian veggies and from my side to put my 10s of orchids in a place where I can set up a very humid environment which allows me not to water them every 2 days ...
The greenhouse is ongoing. It's gonna be 41*28 ft hence around 1150 sqft. The northern side will be a insulated concrete wall. South side will be 5 large double glass windows. Roof and small sides will be made of 32mm polycarbonate. Structure will be made of wood.
Problem is I need to heat up the baby every night during october to march/april. Winter temperatures here are around freezing point and days are very short. At night, without heating, inside temperature will probably go as far down as outside temperature. Which is totally incompatible with my orchids and all the delicious veggies of my wife.
Last point is: part of my land is a forest and since I am bringing down trees for safety reasons, I will be the owner of 50-70 cubic meters of wood. During the time requested to to dry it (2-3 years), I have access to 1 year supplmy of already dry wood and I will have to buy 1 year supply.
So after reading a lot here and there, I decided to build a batchbox rocket stove mass heater.
Here are the main points:
- I want a batch box because due to our activity we won't have 2 hours to spend each day to maintain a J tube RMH. One big batch and refill after 30 minutes is what we would like to achieve;
- As I don't want to fiddle, destroy and reconstruct the "beast", I want to go for a riser made of refractory bricks;
- I prefer to use bells instead of flues (is it the right word ?) as they seem to create less smoke problems (they are more lenient on bad design ...)
- as I need to heat up a large poorly isolated room, I was thinking about a 10 inches batchbox model. Is it too big ? Anyone has plans (exact dimensions for such a big one ?)
- the RMH will be in the center of the northen insulated wall and I would like to have 2 series of bells running on each side of the walls. Hence I need to split the hot air coming out of the riser in 2 to feed the bells on both sides. Has anyone tried this ?
- the bells will extend 5 meters on each side of the central batchbox/riser structure. I would like them to be low and long rather than tall with a small foorptint. Like that, we can germinate our seeds on the warm bankets. Lets say the bells will be 1m tall, 1meter deep. Do I need to separate 3 bells into the 5 meters or 2 bells will be as efficient ?
I drew a very bad sketch of the design that I will post tomorrow. In the meantime, all your comments are more than welcome !
Have a nice day everywhere on planet Earth !
JY
