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  • From: Leigh Hauter <bullrunfarm AT hughes.net>
  • To: <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Heating Greenhouse with wood stoves
  • Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2010 22:05:10 -0400

I hadn't been following this thread until I saw 'wood stoves' so here's my comment, prob ably out of context.

I heat several greenhouses with wood and have been doing so for 15 years more or less.

At first I had a huge wood stove that someone unloaded on me and at the time my greenhouse was only 48 and then 72 feet long, so it kept it warmish. I agree with the hassle of having to get up in the middle of the night.

It wasn't too long until I installed a propane heater so I didn't have to get up at 3 am.

Then, I finally gave in to my wife's annual complain about the dust from woodstove in the house.

I didn't see it and really enjoy living in a house heated with wood but I surrendered my woodstove.

And upgraded to a wood gasification boiler. (actually, technically, these are down draft boilers not gasifiers but they are real efficient. To make my wife happy. I put the wood stove outside (they are actually made to be fitted inside a building). In a room off of the wood shed and close enough to the greenhouse that I could send the hot heating water to the greenhouse as well as to our home.

It worked great. Besides back fitting the old farmhouse part of our home with radiators and putting in radiant heat in the floors of the new part of the house I put a manifold in the greenhouse that could handle six courses of 300 feet each of 3/8 pex which I ran along the tables.

(there are many products you can buy that fit on greenhouse tables that you can run the hot water through but I chose to cut the cost and just run the pex in loops on the tables)

This puts the heat right under the pots and flats where the seedlings appreciate it the most. As we know, seedlings don't much care what the temperature is three feet over their heads, where your typical propane heater blows it, but they really appreciate it warm and cosy at the roots, where my hot water heating wood fueled down draft boiler (this means the gases form the first fire are sucked down and burnt again before making it to the chimney and the outside world) puts it. I could control each run of pex with its own thermostat (I don't, lazy I guess, just one thermostat for the entire greenhouse, where, depending on what I'm growing and how old they are, I can set for 85 or 65, whatever.

This way it can be close to freezing up above the plants but 85 right on the tables and I don't have to heat all of that head space for nothing, or I guess for my own comfort and not the plants. but I digress.

Since then, I've added another couple greenhouses and moved them much further away from the house. What I did is buy a Tarm gasification boiler for the house and took the original Alternative Heating System (AHS) up to the greenhouses where it can, if I need it, heat the tables on all three. I only have to feed the boiler once a night, I usually go up there around ten and fill it up and just after sunup when I don't usually need heat in the greenhouses the woodbox is burning down. It works fine.

The real draw back with using a wood gasification boiler though is the initial cost of the boiler is expensive. Much, much more costly than a wood stove. However, though, I make up for it, eventually with the price of the fuel. With an 80 acre wood, my fuel costs amount to my time and what it cost to maintain a chainsaw. That's probably a lot cheaper than burning propane.

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