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.
For just a few dollars you can construct a PVC greenhouse like this one.
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 of course we have all of the specialty fittings and coverings needed to put these togethers, since the fittings can be kind of hard to find.
Specialty fittings like this can be difficult to find. Except of course from us!
This should be a nice little project for all the weekend warriors out there. If you have any input on structures like these, please leave a comment!
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.
If your furnace looks like this, it probably needs a little on-on-one with a sledgehammer too.
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 in mind the calculators are in Microsoft Excel format, so you will need that or a compatible program and there is a small download.
There are also commercial calculators for a whole host of things if it appies to you. Go ahead and check it out, but be warned it could pretty much ruin your day to actually see the kind of money being wasted simply because of old equipment.
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 lavendar 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, lighting few fried hambuger scented candles and chopping some wood. You know, man things and such.
Seriously though everyone loves candles. Except I’m guessing probably not meat scented ones. :) 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?
It will heat your room and smell like chocolate chip cookies!
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%.
The ecofont at 100%. Click the image for the full effect.
Actually very readable . Now an extreme closup on the exact same font.
The ecofont zoomed in to 400%. Click the image for full effect.
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?
TWEETS
