Sounds like you'll need to explain that this hoophouse/greenhouse/prophouse is subject to fail in climates with snow accumulation. What about shipping costs? What's the package weight? Are the end-walls framed for a heater, exhaust fan and exhaust shutters? What are they made of? What thickness of poly? Nobody wants a green, blue, red, orange, or black "house." They need, clear or white. Personally, the greenhouse hoop bender tool is the best thing on the market today for "smaller" hoophouses such as what you are trying to sell. Instead of PVC, fence rails are bent (much stronger) with ease to form the house. There's a guy on ebay selling this item. Search "Greenhouse Hoop Bender" or something like that. What kind of door is included? What kind of window???? who needs a window? Nobody needs a window is the answer. You have a lot of holes to fill possibly. I don't believe you know what you're getting into. Have you ever used a house? Especially this particular one you wish to sell? 9,999 questions, I know. But maybe this will help you. Dax

Msprettyky, most of the GH I have seen from old windows were sort of designed on the spot. The GH size, shape, and construction depend upon the type, size, and number of windows you have. More information would be helpful. What are you going to grow? What kind of windows do you have? How many? Are you thinking lean-to or detached? SB

I don't know much about gardening in your climate, but I think I can offer at least a few suggestions. I imagine that in the winter you will have a lot of sunshine and the potential for a nice warm greenhouse. The trick will be to retain the heat at night. This is very doable. I'll list a few tactics and you can search this forum and other places for more details on the things that interest you. For winter heat retention, you can make a trench around your greenhouse foundation, down below the frost line and fill the trench with sheets of styrofoam. This method is described here and is also described in Shane Smith's book, A Greenhouse Grower's Companion (or something like that). That is a book you should buy right now! Also in winter, you can create microclimates within the greenhouse. By uncovering things during warm days, then covering crops at night you can get a lot more bang for your buck from your greenhouse. See Elliot Coleman's book, The Four Season Harvest. That is another book you need. Some people have had great luck keeping areas of the greenhouse warm by putting black water buckets underneath the row covers. Overall, there is some dispute about the value of using water as thermal storage. Well, no one disputes that it works but if you do the math it would take a lot of water to actually keep the greenhouse warm. But it is nearly free to fill your extra space with water containers. Soil heating cables are another tactic. These can also be used under a frost blanket in the winter. As for the timing of growing and what you can grow, you will have to experiment. I bet you can get a very long season from your greenhouse. I imagine you could have tomatoes until Thanksgiving and you could get them started again in late Feb. As you probably already know spinach is incredibly healthy and has a million uses. You will be able to grow spinach all winter. Carrots also do well. As long as they are past the seedling stage once winter arrives they will generally make it through the winter. I have carrots in my unheated Montana greenhouse 12 months a year. If I were in your shoes dietarily speaking, I would focus 70% of my energy growing the best food possible. But save 30% of your efforts for canning, freezing, pickling, and otherwise preserving your harvests. That is by far the easiest way to have tomatoes in January. And there are all manner of ways to preserve your produce. See the harvest forum for endless ideas and recipes. The design of your greenhouse is going to be very important here. A well designed and well built greenhouse has huge potential. But if you rush, skimp and compromise, you will regret it. Build the very best (and largest) structure you possibly can. The last thing I will say is that having a productive greenhouse is tremendously satisfying! There is value way beyond the actual spinach and carrots - the whole system is fun and uplifting and rewarding. So enjoy the journey! Take your time and do lots of homework now that you are in the planning stages. Karin

karpes wrote: The system that he has generously shared with us is simple, easy to construct and I believe is the best. What he has accomplished is to increase the oxygen content of the nutrient and also use a smaller capacity pump that does not heat up the nutrient so much. I mean no disrespect to you, willard3, or his design, but I would like to comment on your above statements. When you say a system is the 'best' what does that mean? is it the best for growing strawberries? is it the best for growing pine trees? is it the best for growing watermellons? how can one hydroponic system simply be 'the best'? Any experienced hydroponic system designer would agree that there is no 'best' overall system. You should look at what you want to grow, and how you want to grow it to decide what is best for your individual application. Personally, I think the system he describes on the diagram would be (relativly) expensive to build and horribly inefficient use of space becasue the growing chamber (root space) probably uses less than 1/3 of the total system footprint. Not to say that i dont think it would work, but the only thing that system is the 'best' at is spoon-feeding a single, basic hydroponic design to people too lazy to learn hydroponic theory and come up with their own ideas. I.M.H.O., the fact that there is a picture and a parts list so nothing new has to be learned to build one is not reason enough to call it the best. Next point- Roots vs. Oxygen In economics there is a term called Diminishing Marginal Utility. Basically it refers to the decline in additional utility from consumption of an additional unit of a good as more and more of the good is consumed. Take eating pancakes for example, one pancake is delicious, two is pretty good, by the third you might still be enjoying them, but somewhere around pancake 12 you'll be saying "i hate pancakes". The utility has diminshed to the point where even if someone gave you another pancake for free, you would not want to eat it. The same lesson hold true for plant roots and oxygen. they need some oxygen to survive, adding a little more than what soil can provide is part of what gives hydro the edge over soil growing, but eventually, the oxygen to the roots becomes the pancakes to you or I, they simply can not use anymore. there are quite literally thousands of hydroponic designs that do not use bubblers, falls, and open algea spawning windows to supersaturate the nutirents with air that have worked just fine for decades. Again, i do not mean to be disresectful to you but from the above statements, my guess is that you are just parroting back what some website said and that you really do not have a solid understanding of the root/oxygen relationship. There is a wealth of information both online and at the local library about cellular respiration. If you want to really understand WHY and HOW hydroponics works and not have to rely on the designs of others, this is a great thing to learn. Finally, the pump-to-solution heat transfer difference between two similar pumps (say a 95GPH and a 120GPH) will be negligable. Unless this is the only system you ever want to use the pump for, buy bigger and you'll have a more versatile pump for future hydroponic designs. my sarcasm and flippant tone make this sound like i'm trolling but really i just don't know how to get an idea across without using sarcastic humor (often lost in text based communicaton) or just calling it like i see it. Before anyone writes a heated response about what an arrogant douche i am please remember that what i wrote is just the musings of another anonymous internet user and nothing i type is worth getting upset about. i've been designing and building hydroponics for almost 9 years now and i guess partly i'm bitter becasue almost everything i learned when i started was through my own mistakes, i'm jelous that you n00bs get everything spelled out for you right from the start. to the OP- I think the important thing is to just build SOMETHING. a top drip design just requires 3 simple things. a growing chamber, a nutrient resivior, and a method of geting the nutrients back and forward from one to the other. the rest is just little details you'll learn as you go. good luck.