www.4greenhouses.com

Wow, we've been busy around here. I've been busy enough that I haven't had time to post in a while. But I've had a couple questions recently and I thought it was good to cover the issue of thermostat wiring since cooling season is right around the corner and heater season is still in effect for most of us.

A thermostat is a control system that allows you to automatically, effectively, and cheaply regulate the temperature within a structure. Most everyone is familiar with a thermostat, since your home usually will have one to run both your heating and cooling systems. They can be as simple as a cheap analog dial, and as complicated as multiple range, digital programmable thermostat.

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By all accounts, 2009 is going to be a pretty rough year on an economic and personal finance front.  It has certaily show signs of going that direction already.  However, with turmoil comes the opportunity for change.  To be able to take a fresh look at your situation and try something different. If you have always wanted to grow and maintain your very own vegetable garden, then current events may just be the catalyst you need to pull you off the fence and into the dirt.  Growing your own vegetables has many advantages over simply going to the store.

1. You personally know where your food has come from.
2. It's the freshest, tastiest, and most nutritious way to enjoy food.
3. It saves resources, since you're not having your food shipped thousands of miles to your dinner table any longer.
4. You get the satisfaction of working the earth and providing for yourself
5. It will...

I happened across an interesting article on the future of food that was very sci-fi.  The gentleman in the article is compared to Willy Wonka, and his vision of the future includes one in which we all grow algae on our rooftops and print our hamburgers and french frys like some kind of savory term paper.

Hmm...ok.

There's two ways to look at it. Let's say you have a food printer and eight cartridges, and grow eight crops on the roof, and that's all you need to replicate any food product you can imagine, from mom's apple pie to a cheeseburger with French fries. That would decentralize the food structure, and you'd know exactly where your food comes from. At the other extreme, you have what we've been doing: agriculture. The thing that came after permaculture. The forest goes away, and we plant neat straight rows. But it's not sustainable over the long haul. In the end we're...

One of our salespeople recently had provided some excellent information to one of his customers on the issue of lighting and grow lights.  The customer was going to use grow lights in a research application for test plots of corn.  They were to plant the corn directly into the ground, with the grow lights mounted essentially at gutter height 9' above the plants.  The customer reported less than satisfactory results with this situation.

The short answer was an inefficient lighting arrangement.  However our salesperson did some fancy math to show why the lighting was inefficient and what could be done to maximize this efficiency.  I have excerpted the email he then sent to the rest of the sales staff to broaden our understanding of grow lighting.

Based upon my calculations, I think the location of the ballasts are causing an efficiency loss. The bottom line is that the higher up the lights are, the less light per meter squared you...