Durin’s Day

“When the last moon of Autumn and the first Sun of Winter appear in the sky together” That day when the host of dwarves, a burglar and a wizard went looking for the entrance to the lonely mountain and that treasure of wealth hoarded by a great dragon.

Durin’s Day came and went and what followed were the coldest temps of the season so far. Perfect time to conduct the much anticipated test of the Geothermal heating system in the new greenhouse. The start of December brought us a few weeks where the valley was locked in a thick impenetrable fog, with high temps barely getting to the mid 40’s. Nighttime temps dropped into the 20’s and although the forecast called for mild frost, we had temps into the low 20’s at Illahe. That was a tough couple of weeks, cold coupled with the darkness of the season from the daylight savings switch, multiple days of mist shrouded days, where the sun never showed itself.  I took the opportunity to get into the greenhouse and do some work on the nearly complete geothermal setup. In this episode we will discuss some of the promising first run test results, the failure of technology and the myth of dragons and hoarded wealth and the modern day equivalent.

Narcissus cantabricus showing up as the Winter begins in earnest now, this flower always heralds the Solstice and the Christmas season and will bloom well into the New Year.

For those unfamiliar with the geothermal setup, if you go back to last December I did a feature on the installation of a climate battery type of ground source geothermal heat utilizing air ducting pipes underneath the new greenhouse. At Illahe we are trying our best to minimize our carbon footprint, and be a change agent in the industry for a greener future. The climate battery design is a concept that will allow us to heat the greenhouse without fossil fuels. Relying on a minimal amount of electricity and hopefully down the road we should even have the ability to run the system on a solar powered setup providing a proof of concept that you can heat a greenhouse in the Pacific Northwest without the reliance on fossil fuels. Scroll back about a year through the blog posts to see the construction process.

The series of groundsouce geothermal pipes being installed below the greenhouse for the climate battery desing.

Also known as “poor mans geothermal” the climate battery design utilizes a series of airhandling pipes buried at depth in the soil column. In my case three and a half feet below the floor of the greenhouse. These pipes take the ambient air inside the greenhouse and “inject it” if you will into the mass of the earth, exchanging heat in the process. If you dig down more than a foot deep, the soil mass retains a temperature with a lag period of around three months behind the ambient air temperature. So during the cooling of fall, the soil temperatures are indicative of summers warmth. I posted a little bit about the cooling potential this summer, since during the summer you can capitalize on the cooler soil temps and pump air through the geothermal system. During those experiments a very incredible 15-20 degree F. difference was noted between the greenhouse air temp and the air circulated through the geothermal system. However it wasn’t cooling I had in mind when installing this system, it was heating. Our winters are generally mild, however the past years have brought an increasing frequency of arctic outbreaks, sometimes following very mild winters where the plants have had very little chance to harden off, or even worse have begun vigorous vegetative growth. Often Feburary’s changeable weather is the culprit, and while the lowest low temp I have ever had at the nursery in the past 20 years was 9 deg F. last year brough us a low of 12 degrees and I heated the bulb house for the first time in that 20 years since the bulbs were in such a growth phase after the mild early winter it was necessary to avoid losses.

So when building the new greenhouse I wanted to plan for the much more volatile weather patterns we are seeing in the Northwest. The typical production greenhouse here uses a natural gas or propane heater on a thermostat set to start combusting fossil fuels at a predetermined setpoint. I had been reading about climate batteries and growers that produce Citrus fruit in North Dakota’s frigid winters. The idea of geothermal sounded great, but it was hard to find any real word examples from my neck of the woods, despite some deep research dives. The economics of a climate battery look better and better as fossil fuel prices climb ever higher, and the fact that my rural location leaves only propane being trucked in as the viable option since Natural Gas isn’t available to us. The only ongoing input is a tiny amount of electricity to operate the fan that pushes the air through the geothermal pipes.  This is where we had the first failure. I had a selected a fan, that would push the required amount of air through the battery from the Cannabis industry, a design that growers seem to use to vent out indoor grow rooms through carbon filters to lesson the odor. A fancy PWM Brushless motor vent fan, that would allow me to use the integrated thermostat usb controller like a computer hub to input the set points for charging the battery and discharging the heat into the greenhouse with all sorts of variables to play with like relative humidity, max/min temps, day night time cycles etc. So as the first night of forecasted lows looked to dip well below freezing I got the system up and running. The initial temperature bump was awesome, as the mercury plunged outside, the temps in the greenhouse started to rise well above freezing. I was super happy with the first test, and as I got ready to go to bed I checked it one last time and noticed that the temp was rapidly plummeting in the greenhouse. A quick trip out to the greenhouse, showed that a GFI had tripped, and the lateness of the hour I decided to just unplug the fan and reset the breaker. The mornings dim light showed that the motherboard had fried on the fancy high tech fan. A closer look showed that the lack of waterproofing on the fan circuit board had allowed intrusion from some of that thick fog we had been enveloped in for weeks and the board had fried out. An unfortunate setback, and a disappointment that technology had failed me. A smaller backup fan, of analog design quickly replaced the now useless high tech one. This smaller fan, A Horizontal Air Flow fan of an industrial design specifically for Greenhouses would have no problem with the humidity but was undersized for the required cubic feet per minute required to circulate the air flow in the greenhouse properly. It would have to suffice after the failure of the high tech fan, since it would be a few days before I could get the properly sized fan delivered. Check out the test results from a few nights of running the small fan, the data is super exciting. Temps were kept well above the outside ambient temperature, and I graphed the unheated bulb house which I keep as cool as possible this time of year to try to prevent untimely growth to show the difference between the Geothermal, an unheated greenhouse and the outside temperature. The best part, it’s a tiny fraction of the cost to heat the greenhouse, with none of the negative impacts of fossil fuels

A graph of the 5 night test run of the geothermal with an undersized fan.

The geothermal test results look great, even with the undersized fan the temperature stayed above the outside ambient air temp. With the proper size fan the system should make a big difference in maintaining temperatures above freezing. The bulb house is kept as cool as possible this time of year, to keep the bulbs dormant until the weather says it is time to grow. The coldest night of the season so far was night 5 where the temps outside hit 22, but the geothermal stayed a balmy 28. 5 degrees of heating with just a small fan in a production greenhouse is huge. I’ll show the results of the larger fan system when it’s installed. So far the data is looking great!

“Science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life” Kant.

I couldn’t be happier with the initial tests, the undersized fan showed the ability to maintain a 5-8 degree temperature difference. The larger fan and a more complex set of controls to pump the heated air of mid-day into the battery should in theory give a much higher temperature yield. The science of this is fun and the researcher in me who never go the opportunity to go to grad school is geeking out on the possibilities. I’ll update as more data comes in. I’ve already had a group ask for a talk on the exciting topic of “poor mans geothermal” systems, the new year is booking up fast for speaking engagements so if you would like to have me come and speak, hit that contact button soon.

On Dragons and Society:

Sadly, society and humanity as a whole took a giant leap backwards this past November. You could almost hear a collective gasp around the world as the election results were announced. The move to put Billionaires in charge of every cabinet position possible is one that will not favor or build our society but instead lead to its downfall. Billionaires are a disease, a plague on humanity. The same way the mythical dragons lay upon hoards of wealth, the billionaires have accumulated the masses of resources, and now sit protecting these caches that they could not possibly spend in generations. The disease is real, to watch the decline of society, the myriads of homeless, the hungry around the world, the lack of education and crumbling infrastructure all around them and to turn a blind eye while holding all the tools to effect change for the better on these issues, is definitely a disease. No one ever got to be a billionaire through charity and compassion, they got it by exploitation and greed. These dragons of our modern age will soon be running the education system, the banking system, rewriting the labor laws, the postal service sold to highest bidder, along with the natural resources that we all should own. The denying of medical care to the needy, destroying the unionization of workers, grabbing any and all housing they can get their hands on while people sleep on the street, sending the migrating hoards of humanity looking for a better place in this world back to the repression and poverty from whence they came. The roll backs to environmental protections will happen in real time right before your eyes and sadly, I don’t know that my little geothermal greenhouse operating to try to lesson my climate impact on future generations will make much of a difference. When historians long in the unimaginable future look back and point to the definitive decline of humanity it will no doubt be this precipice at the top of the climb where society took that tumble back down from the long upward trajectory it advanced through millenia. Billionaires are the scourge of humanity, the ultimate disease that will wipe us all out of existence in their insatiable quest for more riches to lay up, not to better humanity and society, but to store away in offshore accounts, bitcoined numbers lost on computers, in yachts and mansions of the few, in space machines and a myriad of other ways that could never benefit the masses, but only gild the few.

If you don’t hear from me before the 25th, I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas, if you can, show some love and charity, we the people, the poor and downtrodden, the broken and huddled must keep charity alive as a concept in the rapidly fading light of humanity.

Mark