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Greenhouses & Garden Structures

What would the temp be at night or How fast do you loss the heat?

18 years ago

If you have a 20 x 10 x 7.5 hoop house with 6 mil plastic

and use 6 32 gallon rubbermaid plastic drums filled with water.

The inside temp is 80 deg at 6p.m. when the sun goes down and the ouside temp drops to 20 deg at night.

Just how fast do you lose your heat?

It's about 550 sqft of area inside.

Thanks

Stan C

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Comments (8)

babbsinaz
18 years ago
I'm new at this. What do you use the 32 gallon drums of water for?

Barbie
stanc
Original Author
18 years ago
The Idear is that stored heated water releases heated water at night.
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babbsinaz
18 years ago
Thanx, just something new you taught me today

Barbie
babbsinaz
18 years ago
Thanx, just something new you taught me today

Barbie
agardenstateof_mind
18 years ago
There's more to it than the stored heat, and I know there are others here who can explain it better than I can, AND give you all the formulae and scientific reasons, etc. ... however ... and I'm going out on a limb a little ... simply put, the presence of enough water creates a sort of "speed bump" in the cooling process. The water cools down to 32 degrees, but then it takes a lot of energy to turn that liquid into a solid; as that begins to happen, apparently the water sort of "throws off" heat - not a lot, of course, but apparently enough. (Any of you physics majors out there, please feel free to clarify, refine or correct where needed.)

I've seen evidence of the reverse, too - that it takes a lot of energy to turn the solid into a liquid. Saw a picture of what had been an ice house ... a fire had consumed the wooden structure, but most of the ice stored within remained.

In addition to one large water-filled tote, I have several 1-gallon jugs and 2-liter bottles stashed throughout my greenhouse.

Di
hadsgaga
18 years ago
If my math is correct the water at best produce about 1500BTUh. It would take about 7500BTUh to keep you above freezing at 20. The warmer temperature the water can obtain in the day the more heat could radiate into the greenhouse. It is no cure but does help. It would take a very efficent design to every store enough heat to make up for the loss of heat. Somewhere around a 1000 gallons of water heated to 80 dregrres would work. But where would you put it.The only solution I can come up with is offsite insulated storage and seperate collectors.
agardenstateof_mind
18 years ago
There's been a lot of discussion on several threads on the topic of thermal mass, some of it very technical, some personal experiences. I'm going to leave it to the pros to go into it further here, if they so desire. Some people wish to try to keep a GH above freezing without auxiliary heat, I'm just looking to a) minimize my reliance on auxiliary heat and b) in the event of a power loss, give me a little extra time to get the backup going.

It certainly didn't cost anything, though the dog misses having all those plastic bottles and jugs to chew up (I certainly don't mind not having to clean up the pieces from the floor!); the only other tension was when I needed the same type of containers for wintersowing ... but my kids gladly increased milk, juice and soda consumption to keep up with my needs. Besides, since I don't have a water line run out there yet, it's real handy for watering :-)

I'm a pretty laid back gardener, hads, I love to experiment and don't mind pushing the boundaries a little sometimes, just for fun ... that's the whole point of this hobby ... if something works, good; if it doesn't, or one doesn't like it, then one doesn't do it. Easy.

(But now there's a thought ... get a second, identical greenhouse to run as a control without the water next year.)

Di
nathanhurst
18 years ago
The water stores 80MJ cooling to freezing point, and another 240MJ to freeze. That's a total of 320MJ, or 300kbtu.

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