Hey how are you ? If I remember right you have a fogger for your greenhouse .Most of the ones I have seen are too big for my 12 X 24 . I have been using an under bench mister with a fan blowing thru the mist the exhaust fan pulls up the cooler air without wetting the plants . The advantage of a swamp cooler over what I have would be too hook it to a thermostat. Thanks for the reply :) Gin

I have a 8hp tecumseh on my snowblower, 10hp Briggs intek on my chipper, 18hp Briggs Vangauard on my generator, a 25hp Kohler Command on my tractor and a honda 5hp lawnmower. All start easy and run great. None of them burn oil. The honda is the quietiest but also has a biggest muffler compared to the others. I will say that I'm disappointed in the honda mower. The underside of my deck is completely rust. I also had to replace the cable to engage the tranny, but had to buy the whole assembly as a kit to get the cable. My deck clogs easily whether I use mulching blades or regular blades and the cut isn't that great. The engine my be great, but the rest of the mower is not worth the 400 paid for it. With proper car, air filter changes, oil changes, new spark plugs, and good gas, any engine will last a long time. I know a lot of people that just put gas in and go. Then the engine breaks and the equipment is the biggest piece of junk. For the average homeowner, I don't think the engine should be of a concern. I think the unit its mounted too should be of more importance.

Cindy, follow the link below to view my pads. Mine is bit more complicated than needed since I have it in two sections around the door. One pump with the supply line split to feed both sides. The two supply tanks are connected and being on the same level, they still filled with one automatice float valve. The pump is a 300 GPH@5feet of lift. You can see in the photo it is a small pump. Sits right on the bottom of the tank. The pads are each one foot wide and three feet high. I have eight for my house. Yours wouldn't need that many being a smaller house. You should be able to get by with half that. They are Glacier-Cor pads from IGC:http://www.greenhousemegastore.com/ The frame is simple as you can see in the photo. A vinyl gutter from Lowes rest on the bottom of the frame. A piece of benchtop in the gutter keeps the pads out of the return flow of water. The water distribution line is adjustable with the valve at the top. Small holes drilled about 2 inches apart down the PVC pipe provide the flow. Holes at the top so the holes will be less likely to clog. The union on the pipe allows you to rotate the pipe to center the flow over the pads. I have mine barely squirting up out the holes. You want the pads moist but not a flowing wall of water seen cascading down. The sides and top of the frame are sealed with plastic to keep the air from slipping around the pads. Once every three weeks, I add Physan 20 at their recommended rate to keep algae from developing. A small greenhouse is hard to cool that way since the short space the moist air is moving across does not give it much time to evaporate and provide the needed cooling. Someone else may have experience as to what to expect from your size. Another consideration is the fan size you have. Assuming it now provides the recommended exchange of air once every 60-90 seconds, it should work ok. Hope I've given you some ideas on how to design a simple pad system. Good Luck! Jerry Here is a link that might be useful: My cooling system

I just read through this long topic and in a couple of places Norway spruce was mentioned. A study was done at SUNY Syracuse a few years ago to determine the growth curves for Norway spruce in unthinned stands in New York State. They analyzed a large number of stands on a variety of soils (somewhere between 50 and 100 if I remember right). They "destructively sampled" a large number of the tallest trees and plotted their growth, taking into account the number of times the trees had been weeviled and/or had other kinds of injuries. Anyway, to reduce a long and thorough study to the bare essentials, on the best sites trees that were 4.5 feet tall at a starting point were about 115 feet tall after 50 more years. The starting point of 4.5 feet was selected because the time it takes to get to that height was affected by many unpredictable factors such as weed competition, etc. that it couldn't reasonably be factored in. I have done my own measurements on a small number of stands in MD and WV and have found some that exceed those in NY by a small margin, the best being a little over 120 feet in 50 years after the 4.5 foot height was achieved. It is my general impression that if the best strains were grown on the best soils, the growth would be somewhat better than 120 feet. Almost all the spruce stands I have found have been growing on class three forest soils, whereas class 2 soils are fairly common in this region. To explain just a bit, on a class 3 forest soil red oak will grow to 65 or 75 feet in fifty years, on a class two soil, 75 to 85 feet. So the importance of soil quality is rather great in determining the potential growth of trees. Class 1 soils are fairly rare in this region and tend to be bottomland soils suited to a limited number of species. The one thing that really struck me about these growth curves determined by the folks at SUNY Syracuse is that unlike the growth curves of virtually all other species that I have seen growing in the Eastern U.S., these growth curves were not really "curves" at all, but rather straight lines that as they left the graph at the 50 year mark were showing an undiminished rate of growth. Other growth curves show a "curve" that shows decelerating growth at that point. But, based on my own observations, the growth rate of Norway spruce does start to diminish fairly soon after the 50 year mark. I haven't seen the growth curves for redwoods and other western species, but I would assume that they use a 100 year time frame and must be something really impressive. My guess is that the best Norway spruce growing on the best soils in forest stands in the Allegheny region would eventually get somewhere close to 200 feet, about the same as in the best stands in Europe. The oldest spruce I have seen here are somewhere near 150 feet now and are growing, in one case, 6 to 10 inches per year at 100 years old (Rothkugel), and in another 12 to 20 inches per year at 73 years old (Glady), but both of these are on class 3 soils. --Spruce