Yay!
Our blog now has its own home on the Interwebz. The old www.4greenhouses.com/blog will continue to work, but for future reference the new home of Around the Backyard is:
Bet you never could have guessed that.
Also our support forum has its own home now as well. The old URL of www.4greenhouses.com/forum will also continue to work, but it's now at:
Keep checking for more updates. We have some pretty big changes planned for this year and we wouldn't want you to miss any of them.
Whew! We have been all kinds of busy around here upgrading our web presence. For starters we performed a major upgrade to the Greenhouse Megastore that gives us some added capabilities. Look for some pretty signifigant changes there as we do some redesigning of the entire site.
We also moved the entirety of 4greenhouses.com to a new server. This move expands our capability and gives us what we feel is a more reliable website for many reasons.
Between databases, data migration, and being elbow deep in error messages it's been a little hard to see straight. But, the hard part is behind us and we can move forward. Because the whole reason for all this was giving you, our valued customers, a more pleasing browsing experience and enabling you to find the products you need more easily. And with the addition of 4greenhouses, enabling you to find...
We recently did a complete install of a PDP250 heater for a local customer. Complete installation is something we normally do not do, but we figured we have put plenty of these heaters in and to do the install locally would be alright.
Nothing can drive home the point of hiring a trained professional to do an install of this magnitude than trying to install one yourself. The smaller, Hot Dawg models are one thing (and even these can be tricky when it comes to troubleshooting). The big boys are a whole different ballgame. Allow me to elaborate.
Reasons to have PDP heater professionally installed (and to think about it for an HD heater):
I've gotten a few questions lately regarding a DIY residential greenhouse made from PVC pipe and greenhouse poly film. Such projects are great way to provide yourself with an inexpensive greenhouse, and as long as you don't expect a great deal of permanancy out of them, are a great way to supplement your growing season.
Often however, I get asked if we have or sell plans to construct these buildings. Well, we don't. But, I have found a pretty good source for such plans and another one here.
And of course we have all of the specialty fittings and coverings needed to put these togethers, since the fittings can be kind of...
From everyone at IGC, we wish you all a great 2009!
Celebrate safely!
Old and inefficient furnaces, air conditioning units, and appliances waste boatloads of energy and are notoriously unfriendly to the environment. That, and of course they cost us all mountains of cash in unnecessary energy costs. Several times this winter I've heard or read about online calculators that you can use to figure out your energy usage and estimate the energy savings created by upgrading to more efficient systems. I decided to look into the usefulness of said calculators and was pleasantly surprised. Or I suppose terribly disappointed is more accurate, based on the results.
Anyway, the government actually has some great information on its Energystar website. I used the heating calculator, and needless to say my 35 year old furnace has rocketed to the top of my household list of repair/replacement priorities! I've provided links to specific calculator sections below. Keep...
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us at International Greenhouse Company!
There's nothing I like more than lighting a few lavender scented candles, drawing a nice warm bubble bath and...oh wait. Am I writing this out loud? Uhh...uhh....what I mean is errr...throwing on my plaid flannel shirt and suspenders, grilling some meat over an open flame, and chopping some wood. You know, man things and such.
Seriously though everyone loves candles. I happened upon a nifty candle heater that puts to good use all the lost heat of a candle. Simple, efficient design and looks pretty nice too. I haven't tried one, and I doubt it's going to heat your whole garage or anything like that. But hey, every little bit helps right?
A co-worker showed me this neat little font called the ecofont. Basically, it's a font with holes in the letters. The designers claim the font uses about 20% less ink than a similar font without the holes. I made some images to show what the font looks like at 100% and zoomed in to 400%.
Actually very readable at 100% size.
Now an extreme closup on the exact same font.
Pretty neat if you ask me.
Like any respectable Web 2.0 company (not that we are...yet) these days, we of course have a Twitter feed. Feel free to follow us.
Also, if any of you out there want to follow more gardening tweeters, I found a couple of posts over at ColdClimateGardening.com that contain a laundry list of gardening tweeters and even Twitter gardening groups. Check out the first post listing 25 of the top gardening tweeters, and a follow up post listing another couple dozen tweeters. The second post also has links to follow a few Twitter gardening groups.
Niiiice. The wonders of the ol' interweb. What will they ever think of next?
