PSU Climate Battery 2018-2019 Study now available - Threefold Farm Weve begun raising the night-time temperatures in the gray house to help bring the figs out of dormancy and simulate the start of spring. We continue to add sensors to the greenhouse. We'd love to hear your thoughts on what would be helpful information-wise (see the comments section below). In 2020, Tim co-founded Atmos Greenhouse Systems, a company focused on climate battery greenhouse growing. Cloudiness may be a very limiting factor here in the winter. The duct must also be long enough with a large enough diameter for air to effectively move through it. It should be noted as an additional guide rather than a go-to reference at this stage in the study of climate batteries, so please use at your own risk and do your own research prior to installing a system like this. We would have liked to have gone even heavier with insulation to perhaps a 2", R10 board, but the budget did not allow for it. Some thought was given as to the value of insulation in the soil around the climate battery. As for soil temps, the cold weather caused them to dip as we were pulling on the climate battery almost every night and there really wasnt enough sun to fully recharge. Our impetus for 2019-2020 was to come up with a design that more properly interfaced with the soil. We've setup our greenhouse to have a two stage thermostat powering fans that draw 1.1kW at full speed. However, on cold nights we have a hard time drawing enough from the thermal mass in order to properly heat the house. Our houses only had two sunny days to capture any warmth but fortunately our night temps barely dipped below freezing. However it quickly became apparent that due to rocks, we'd have to excavate nearly the entire footprint of the site. However, I think it would function well as a substitute for season-extension similar to how many greenhouse tomatoes are grown. Our excavation of the site for the climate battery installation initially went well, but we soon began to encounter boulders, lots of them, on the western side of the site. One of the suggestions that installers of these batteries make is to have some form of backup heat for extended cold snaps. One other interesting observation are the closed houses. Temperatures at the end of March were cold with nights still in the 20s and days that didnt get very warm. That said, the existing designs have significant flaws. Rather than aim for a specific pipe length, the goal at Atmos is twofold: to balance the airflow and ensure that the resulting airflow across all of the tubing falls in the ideal range of 4+ m/s. It was proposed that both the intake and exhaust fans would be matched in flow rate and higher CFM fans would be preferred like those in the gray house. The winds finally died down partway through the second night. When the sun comes out, farmer Tim likes to play! # - Facebook Sensors in place to monitor greenhouse temperature as well as the temperature of the outlets to determine an approximate climate battery temperature. We learned more about which varieties do well in the greenhouse and will be removing some varieties to favor others in the coming years. Before embarking on any additional systems I would certainly like to more formally study this one more, perhaps with the aid of a university or other firm. The blue house is showing its overall colder state with the battery struggling to keep temperatures above freezing on an 18F night, while the gray house doesnt seem to have any issues maintaining a ~34F set low temp (when you consider the differential), despite climate battery temperatures continuing to drop. Other techniques for using the heat of the earth and excess captured heat from the sun can be found in structures like the walipini and solar greenhouses. With a more effective heat transfer solution, perhaps this could be stretched further and prevent valuable heat from being vented in the shoulder seasons. Our in-ground trees should have survived the winter just fine in the house, and our hardier citrus did fine in pots in the house and helped (along with the oat cover crop) to serve as our "canaries in the coalmine" in terms of indicators of hardiness. Whether this is just a cloudy winter or the norm, I'm not sure. How to Set Up a Greenhouse Kit for Beginners, 3 Best Geodesic Greenhouse Kits To Buy In 2021. What I'm beginning to see is that running the heating several nights in a row without some solar gain really draws on the battery, at least the area immediately surrounding the tubing. In addition, the curtain seems to reflect sun during the day, meaning the house does not heat as much.*. Climate Battery Version 1 - The "Gray House" - Sketchfab Given the overall colder nature of the blue house ground and the lack of a second layer of poly, the lower temperatures do make sense. It would be great to know if changing the backfill to another type of media (sand, gravel), might allow the heat to flow more quickly away from the piping and into the surrounding soil. PDF Agriculture Program - mesas.org It's interesting though, that the remainder of the week remained cool and cloudy, so that the inside temp struggle to even reach 50 or 60 despite outside temps in the 40s. Guide to the Best Greenhouse Crops for Winter, Guide to Evaporative Coolers in Greenhouses. The previous estimate was based off of exhaust port temperatures which don't give a true temperature of the soil, just of the air exiting the exhaust tubing. Threefold Farm - A Farm of Unusual Fruits It truly functions like a battery, meaning we can charge it so that its warmer than the surrounding soil, and we can discharge it if were not careful, even to the point where the temperature can actually be colder than the surrounding soil. We prepped the greenhouse this week for planting in about a month and spread mulch and eventually will spread a black tarp that should bump temps in the house quite a bit on sunny days. View Atmos Climate Battery Plans and Services. At Threefold Farm, we've been pleased with the performance of our climate batteries. It's been really hard to get sun and as a result the ground temps have been pretty steady. One thought is that the higher velocity (speed) air creates more turbulence within the piping, leading to increased contact with the walls of the piping, leading to greater heat transfer. Gray HouseClimate Battery Temp - 5553FThermostat Hi/Lo - 75/36F (2F diff)Weekly High/Low - 91F/37F, Blue HouseClimate Battery Temp - 6055F at ~18 depthThermostat Upper Hi/Lo - 75/36F (2F diff), Thermostat Lower Hi/Lo - 75/36F (2F diff)Weekly High/Low - (likely 90F)/36F. Check it out below! Overall its been a very mild winter and as such I havent lowered the thermostat settings in the greenhouses to compensate. Ive attempted to briefly summarize their findings as well as provided their final report and presentation and made it available as a standalone page. The airflow causes a heat transfer between the air and ground and, using the typically colder subsurface earth as a heat storage mechanism, one can We expected the site to settle somewhat but it really only settled around the risers where the equipment couldn't compact it very well. The week of 1/20 looks to be significantly colder with a dip or two down into the low teens to single digits. How much heat is transferred from the surface of the soil to the air in the house? With the climate battery temperature in the 60s, it's rather easy to keep the tunnel heated. In short, what's the point of investing in and using a climate battery if you'll additionally need to invest in a conventional heater? Merry Christmas everyone! In the future we'll start listing the starting and ending temperatures for the week for the climate battery, and may list in-between temps if there are significant swings. The heat and moisture from the air are transferred to the subsoil, releasing cooler, drier air back into the greenhouse. Fairly mild week, with only two nighttime lows dipping down into the mid to low 20s. If youre interested in partnering with us, please Contact Us and let us know the ways in which youd like to help. We likely could have easily kept the greenhouse from dipping below 32F but didn't feel the need to. Despite using an internal cover (though not a great one), internal temps dropped significantly below freezing though still 15-16F above the outside temperature. Currently we have one thermostat for heating and another for cooling, both of which simply turn on the fans. After the pipes were backfilled we hand-tamped each run except the topmost layer as we figured it would be tamped during the backfill and leveling process. Details from the latest PSU climate battery study should be forthcoming by about mid May. We will keep the battery turned off even through a few nights in the mid-to-low 20s, since these sorts of temps wouldn't hurt the types of plants we want to grow during their dormancy. Good designs are quite different. It would also eliminate the need for large-diameter corrugated piping for risers and manifolds, which were expensive and difficult to work with (though they looked cool). At this point in the year, were beginning to vent the houses just by opening one or two person doors on the sunniest of days. Magazine Preview - HGA Online Based on their data and conclusions, I see no other commercially-available system that is as energy-efficient at delivering heating and cooling. Just 2 days of good sun this week, otherwise its been gray with a couple nights dipping into the teens. One climate battery would be installed even lower in the ground, ideally 6-8' underground, to allow us to capture some of the earth's latent heat for the coldest of nights. The storage and transfer of this heat is typically accomplished by burying corrugated perforated tubing beneath the greenhouse structure and running a fan to push air through the tubing. On that night, the difference between the houses was 4F. As expected the climate batteries continued to hold steady or buffer up slightly. Sunny days are really helpful to the system but we still haven't seen much more than 2-3 sunny days a week. The gray house was able to maintain 5F cooler with the system on versus the blue house. For comparisons sake, it appears that the ground temperature in the gray house last year at this time was approximately 5F warmer. Our studies with students at PSU and Sawyer (our 3D modeler here at Atmos) have identified two big problems in the the tubing setup. In any case, Im hoping the figs go dormant soon, at least before we have to drop the temperature in the greenhouse to below freezing. We're blessed with great soils here but the construction of the system has us planting in mostly unimproved subsoil at this point. Keep up-to-date with the goings-on at Threefold Farm, including current farm u-pick and farm stand hours. A single layer of plastic certainly allows more light, but even a minimal air layer between two sheets helps significantly in retaining heat and is likely worth the added expense of the plastic and the inflation cost, so itll likely be something we retrofit onto the tunnel later. This would also allow us more fine-grained control over how many fans came on and so may allow (this is just theory) for staged heating, and perhaps overall lower electric cost. Our Team Atmos Greenhouse Systems With that relief, the temperatures recovered somewhat and we saw the buffering of the batterys temperatures back toward the normal 52F. Gray HouseClimate Battery Temp - 5664FThermostat Hi/Lo - 75/33.5F (2F diff)Monthly High/Low - 95F/30.3F, Blue HouseClimate Battery Temp - 5154F at ~18 depthThermostat Upper Hi/Lo - 75/33.5F (2F diff), Thermostat Lower Hi/Lo - 75/33.5F (2F diff)Monthly High/Low - 100F/26.5F. Blue HouseClimate Battery Temp - 4244FThermostat Upper Hi/Lo - 65/32.5F (3F diff), Thermostat Lower Hi/Lo - 65/32.5F (3F diff)Weekly High/Low - 77F/25F, Gray HouseClimate Battery Temp - 5248FThermostat Hi/Lo - 65/34.5F (2F diff)Weekly High/Low - 79F/28F. This should be only be done in easy-to-install, economically feasible ways. 2021s Top 3 Solar-Powered Greenhouse Exhaust Fans, 3 Automatic Greenhouse Vents Guaranteed to Make Gardening Easier, 5 Tips for Greenhouse Ventilation and Cooling, How to Build a Climate Battery for a Greenhouse. Our figs grew well in the tunnels, despite compacted ground, I believe due to their vigorous rooting nature and the addition of compost and a nice wood chip mulch. Unanswered questions remain as to the overall capacity of the soil to retain and deliver heat and how best to scale a climate battery system to match the heating and cooling needs of a structure. This may be due either to my lack of watering (my bad, I watered thoroughly twice this week after discovering this), or perhaps because they partially rooted into ground outside the greenhouse and perhaps the roots have gone dormant out there due to the ground freezing? Moved temperature sensor away from the wall of the house and placed it approximately 4' into the structure. The first step in building a climate battery is gathering your supplies. Dehumidification - When the greenhouse is in cooling mode, condensation in the air does seem to drop out. The climate battery greenhouse was a project undertaken in late 2017 to provide a low-energy consumption means of controlling the climate in our 30x96 high tunnel. The month of May doesnt look to be much warmer at least on the front end but Im hopeful that were through any freezing nights. We officially hit the winter solstice so the sun will only get stronger from here (at least until June). That said, the existing designs have significant flaws. The gray house will now kick on at 32.5F while Im allowing the blue house to dip below freezing. This works well but there are instances where a second fan at the exit might serve to both boost airflow (causing a greater turbulent flow) and total air volume moved through the system. Ep 54. Tim Clymer on Propagating Unusual Fruit We're utilizing 20" HAF fans from two different manufacturers to push air through the earth tubes. I have been turning off the heating portion of the climate battery on warmer nights, but will begin to switch it such that it kicks on at a lower temperature, perhaps 24F, so that the system isn't taxed as heavily. An orchard and nursery in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. On the initial cool to cold nights (lows in the 30s and 40s) we kept the houses relatively unsealed around the sliding doors to facilitate some air exchange and prevent humidity buildup. The growing season of 2018 was a successful one, despite challenges. I imagine this could be greater if we would deploy the internal cover every night. Were attempting to manage ground temperatures so the plants slowly go to sleep but also so that we have enough stored thermal energy to weather any cold snaps. Well keep our setpoints as-is until the next cold snap comes then likely lower it to the winter set point of around 24F. Across the width the ground did not vary much in elevation, but down the length from west to east it dropped 11". The remaining fans will likely be used a simple circulation fans in the greenhouse come spring. At this point, the strength of the sun and length of the days allows us to raise or maintain ground temperatures despite cold nights. Blue HouseClimate Battery Temp - 57~60FThermostat Upper Hi/Lo - 80/40F (3F diff), Thermostat Lower Hi/Lo - 80/40F (3F diff)Weekly High/Low - 107F/23F, Gray HouseClimate Battery Temp - 605664FThermostat Hi/Lo - 80/40.5F (2F diff)Weekly High/Low - 104F/37F. Well attempt to keep the temperature in the blue house perhaps a little higher while the plants germinate and establish, then lower it to conserve heat. Truly balanced airflow probably is not achievable without resorting to expensive measures. After a cold week last week, temps have climbed to more regular levels this week. Many crop insurance causes of loss result from adverse weather, which is made worse by the climate emergency. Due to our excavation of almost the entire site, most of the ground posts went in without issue except those that encountered the boulder in the corner of the site. Some tubes get a much larger share of the airflow from the fans while some tubes are starved for air. The risers with the connected manifolds were then moved to the edges of the site and positioned such that the diagonals would accommodate the 30' runs of 4" ADS. I would assume at some point that the heat transfer would max out at a certain velocity then perhaps begin to decline. However, this would likely to result in the climate battery system running all night due to the low differential between the set temperature and the thermal mass temperature and the high differential between the set temperature and the outside temperature. We had enough peaks of sun this week to bring the houses up to temp during the day, but not really enough to bank any heat. Each of these batteries consisted of a 24" ADS pipe riser (a section cut to ~6' long) connected to a 20' long, 18" diameter horizontal manifold on one side of the greenhouse connected to another 24" riser with an 18" manifold on the other side. Separate layers to be installed at 2, 4, 6, and 8 below grade. Still haven't put figs in the greenhouse, will likely do that over the next week. So for instance heating into the fall, our Set Point is 50F when our expected nighttime lows are ~28-30F. It doesn't look like it will begin to warm up until late next week. PSU Climate Battery 2018-2019 Study now available. We respect your privacy and will not share your email address with any other parties. Our established gray house has been significantly warmer this fall, I believe owing to the remainder of heat stored in the soil. What are the nameplate am. December 13, 2017 - Outside Low 19F, Winds 25mph (40-50mph gusts), Climate Battery 42F, Inside Temp Low 29.1F (see below) No significant sun for the past few days followed by a very windy and cold. Imagine how a well-designed tubing layout would function! Why? 2004 honda civic hybrid cvt transmission problems FAQ - Pale Blue Earth NZ For the gray house we hit 19F, a 24F differential with the outside. Even with the comparison between heating methods it will be hard to calculate the exact "heating" value that the system provides. Could some manifolds and risers be shared between two or more systems? . We've heard anecdotally that a larger building is in some ways easier to heat and cool because of the larger air mass. The temperature of the earth fluctuates less the further removed you are from the surface (see temperature by depth and season graphic to the right).