Thanks everyone for the nice comments. It is true that I just started this greenhouse as an experiment. I read Anthony’s book several years ago and got the bug like a lot of you did. I read everything on the Internet I could find like Scubadude’s and Treeman’s threads. When I got myself in the position to actually do something I figured I still didn’t know squat and I should start off very small. So why not share the experience with everyone else?
So here we are a year later…
I find myself still growing fantastic looking corals indoors, but not so much outdoors. I look back at the electrical cost in the summertime….and the wintertime (ugh)! That is a nightmare! At this point it is quite obvious to me that I am better off indoors with a small system.
Now what if I want to have a larger system? I think there is a lot of good advice out there and on this thread. Certainly the #1 priority would be to reduce my electrical costs. This was money wasted mostly on heating and cooling. A bunch of you have chimed in with ideas about this. Passive greenhouse design, geothermal heating/cooling supplementation, solar heating just to name a few. You never know….in an area like mine with 80% + humidity, the most efficient design may be a mixture of air conditioning with geothermal. Redox is in up to his neck examining the finer points of heating/cooling in our shared coastal NC climate. He had a fantastic operation setup which enables him to make adjustments and gauge results with minimal effort or redesign. I will admit that a lot of my decisions on the next system will be molded by his personal results…..as long as he doesn’t catch me peaking over his shoulder.
The next hurdle I would tackle would be the lighting/spectrum issues. There is a wealth of information near the middle of this thread. I will be going over that stuff again and again I am sure. I would not mind acquiring samples of some film, glass, and polycarbonate materials to actually test with.
After all of that, I think a lot of inefficiencies can by lessened with pure volume. This little 8x6 foot greenhouse is destined for growing veggies the rest of its life.
I will continue to post and read here on Reef Central. I encourage those of you with propagation related plans and ideas to share this knowledge. This is a hobby for most of us, and the advancement and enjoyment of the hobby should be the #1 priority. We should also keep in mind that we are dealing with a limited resource that may one day rely on the combined knowledge of an industry to protect it from extinction.
If there was one important lesson I did pick up from the “Bible†that Samtheman so purposely advocates, it is this………There was more money in writing that book, than running that greenhouse. So, you better have a good time doing it.
