Rinna Hoffman

Oh yes please! Spain is lovely!!
I love this idea - snail mail is a lost art!!

After being suspicious of SharkBites for years, I used one to hook up the water line for a new. Refrigerator - I was blown away by how easy it was!
I agree- anything that needs to be done in situ totally warrants using one instead of trying to solder over your head between joists or inside drywall.

I do have a blower for inflating the two layers of film - but I may have a few holes in the film so that is a whole other issue....
Yeah the South side is weird because it has the door and a giant furnace (commercial operation previously) on it. Maybe I will just insulate the lower half of the wall and make sure the door seals really well?

That is a good point about the thermal mass I would be losing if I insulated on top of the ground inside. I think the frost skirt is the way to go.
The greenhouse is kind of shaped like a house with vertical walls and a sloped roof so I'm planning on insulating the vertical walls all the way around (especially since the greenhouse is not really facing south).
The glazing is double polyurethane and I'm trying to keep the temp above 45 or so in the winter.

I've posted before about my greenhouse and it's issues (mainly that I didn't build it and it used to be for a commercial flower operation). After burning through way too much oil trying to heat it last winter (I'm in Upstate NY) I am set on making a few changes this summer so that next winter I don't have to do the same thing.

One thing I know I need to do is insulate the walls, but the ground inside the greenhouse is another matter. I have a barn full of recycled 3 inch foam insulation board that I am planning on using. Ideally I would build a frost skirt around the whole structure to insulate the inside ground from the frost on the outside. But I have a few issues that I'm going to run into: one of the walls of the greenhouse is on the edge of a pretty steep down slope, and on the other end is a chicken house and some pretty well established grape vines that I don't want to mess with.

I guess my question is for the downslope - if I lay insulation on top of this slope and then sort of backfill over it (I could only do a few inches though as there is another greenhouse down that slope about five feet away) - do you think that will provide enough protection from both the frost and the outside air (I will also be insulating up that wall)?

For the chicken house and grape vines I'm very puzzled. There is a wall and a door that section off that part of the greenhouse and I am planning on insulating those, but the ground is another thing. If I leave the ground uninsulated will I negate all the efforts of insulating everywhere else?

My one other thought is to chuck the frost skirt idea and just insulate the floor inside the greenhouse. I was planning on putting in raised beds anyway since the ground is gravel and I can't really plant things directly into that anyway.
Any thoughts or suggestions?

Hi! I recently moved to upstate NY to a property that was run as a commercial flower greenhouse operation. There are 4 giant greenhouses and I'm starting with one of them to try to make it less of an oil guzzling monster. Right now they each have a 250gal oil tank and a hot air furnace (which to me seems ridiculously inefficient)
The one I'm starting on is smaller - maybe 20' x 50' double polycarbonate and is attached to the chicken/duck coop. I'm trying to work with what I got as much as possible, so please don't suggest I tear things down and start over. (even though I would love to since the greenhouses are oriented the wrong way and two of them are in the shade in the winter... SMH).
So far I've got a couple of 55 gallon barrels full of water in there that don't seem to heat up super well during the day so I got a super cheap inflatable hot tub off the internet and am planning on trying to pump the warm water into the barrels at night, or maybe use that water to pump through planting beds to keep the soil warm.
But right now this is my dilemma: I moved an old Fisher woodburning fireplace insert into the greenhouse that the old owners left sitting on the porch here. I want to try to hook it up out in the greenhouse, pile as much thermal mass next to it/on top of it as possible and see how that goes. I can grab a bunch of galvanized (maybe?) stovepipe off the boilers in the other greenhouses, but I'm wondering if it's worth spending money to get new stovepipe for the 15 feet, give or take, that need to run up inside to the roofline. I know that single walled pipe will give off more heat inside the greenhouse, but I'm not sure if I should even use the old pipe if I go that route - I don't know if galvanized is even usable on wood stoves? I'm also worried that maybe with the single wall pipe there will be too quick of cooling one it gets away from the stove and not enough draft?
Any thoughts/suggestions welcomed.

thanks!

I just want to say that I love the half pickup truck as a trailer. That is all.