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Old 08-09-15, 05:49 AM   #260
jeff5may
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: elizabethtown, ky, USA
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My dad and I built an earth ship inspired greenhouse when I was in my early teens, built much like the first pic in your last post. I Can't remember whether it had three or four door panels in the front, but we used car tires for the walls and bedrails for the framing. For insulation and thermal mass, we filled the tires with sandy dirt from a nearby river bottom. The only wood we used was for casing the windows and back door. The vent was above the door, and was recycled from a commercial greenhouse that was being renovated.

We lived near Denver, Colorado then. The climate there was much more extreme than here in the Ohio valley. With many more sunny days per year, making it through the winter was not a problem. During the hot season, we used white greenhouse plastic film on the outside to limit solar gain. Inside, a humidifier/cooler was made that resembled a fishing livewell. A PVC pipe with holes drilled in it dripped into a rain gutter to snatch heat and add moisture to the growing space. The gutter drained through the back wall and fed a miniature cooling tower outside of the growing area. On hot, dry days, the climate inside of the space resembled a rain forest jungle. The plants loved it, humans not so much.

Out there, snowfall was a blessing in disguise. Most of the light storms were followed by bitter cold, and the light snow would remain as insulation until the sun returned. The angle of the panels did not allow heavy snowfall to remain. Once it got thick enough it would slide off. One thing the earth ship guys told my dad was to allow for snow self-removal by not installing the door panels too close to the ground.

The greenhouse build inspired my parents to build an attached sunroom onto the southeast side of the house and it also performed very well at keeping the house warm in the winter. It was built by contract, and the builder did not understand the reason why my dad wanted low-e windows and 2x6 walls with blown cellulose insulation, nor why he did a concrete slab floor way thicker than it should be. He took the extra money and overbuilt it like my dad ordered, though. After the first winter, with the sunroom heating the house well, dad decided to overinsulate the roof with blown rockwool...I guess the savings were substantial enough to speak to him.
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