Well, maybe not quite the world's most expensive, but it sure ain't cheap.





Going to have passive solar heated air piped through the floor/dirt, a separate room for sprouting fodder for the horse, cows, chickens and turkeys and a cellar attached.  Lots of work to do still.  I'm still tinkering with the design of the trusses, but I know what the concrete will look like so I'm still moving forward.

"Fodder"

Awesome dude, what size? Is the building going to incorporate passive solar besides the normal windows and vegetation. What method for air piping? Collection solar heaters en route?

I'm having a hard time finding a good picture of a hat this will look like; but here's a page with some similar so designs.

This will be a walapini style greenhouse which is partially buried to use the earth as thermal mass.  My friend has one just across the county and 4 years ago I walked into his when it was -17 outside and his tomatoes were still alive.  Not producing, but alive.  his winter crops like beets and lettuce were doing great.  He has no heat source and no power in his greenhouse.  He also doesn't have any automated venting so in the spring/fall when the days are hot and nights are cold (we live at 6200') he has to manually take care of the venting.  My hope is that I won't have that trouble

A link with some pics of crappy sunken greenhouses

Dug in greenhouses

Where are you located in Utah?

Greenhouse is 24'x40' with a 10x20 fodder room and 10x20 cellar on the back.

I'm not quite sure on all the air piping yet.  I had access to a good concrete guy (my friend and neighbor) who has time for this during winter but needs to focus on making money in the other seasons, so we are getting concrete placed in the heart of the cold weather.  Once that's in I'll set trusses; polycarbonate, roofing and then figure out the air:

I've been experimenting with sprouted barley fodder for about 4 years now and used a 100' pipe underground to passively moderate the temps of air in my sprouting rooms, but this will be a lot bigger.  I'll be collecting some of the hot air off the top and probably have to use fans to bring it down and warm the ground, but I can passively use a chimney action to cool it.  The fodder room has to be 70 degrees at all times with as much fresh air as I can get to it.

I'll likely be digging under the walls/footing to place the air pipes in a few months.  That gives me more time to figure it out too.

Sanpete County

Good stuff, OP.

In for the progress. 

Where will you grow your Bantha fodder?

this is a tag

Tagscribe

Same as always....

Where do you get yours?

In on 1

I have about 50 super thermal insulated panels that cost 1200$-3000$ each.  R value 8.5.  I got from work for free.   Every time we put new coolers in I kept the doors off the tear outs.  One day I will have a Walipini in ground green house.  They are insulated so they don't sweat.    
 

dope?   

OP, very nice! Are you LDS by chance?

I don't want to scare you, but I used to have a greenhouse made of those.  It was like having a giant magnifying glass on the plants year round, impossible to cool off enough in the summer, high maint and overall poor performing.  We eventually replaced all the glass with shaded polycarbonate and it did a lot better.  That was a big above-ground style, but it had lots of venting, swamp cooler, etc and still did terribly.


Here's what I'm working on now.  These are two designs for the trusses, one with 1.5x1.5" galvanized HSS, the other with some 2x1 aluminum.  The aluminum doesn't work structurally, so I've got to do more work to find if it's economically viable compared to the steel.  I don't want a large section inside casting shadows on the plants, so I'm going to do a lot of figuring before I decide on the final truss design.  

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Bump for update

It's under a foot of snow, but we are supposed to quit getting snow and warm up for a few days so I should be able to do some final digging and get the footings formed this weekend.  That's the goal anyway.

I'd get a pic but it's dark and everyone knows what snow looks like.

Did some work on the greenhouse today, I think I've got the trusses all figured out now.  I'm going to use aluminum, but I also bumped up the back of it to be a few feet higher than the back wall so that I can actually do what I've been dreaming about since I moved to 6200' elevation in Utah- Grow avocado and Kiwi.  To do that I will want the back wall taller than 8 or 9 feet because both the avocado and kiwi will have to be on the back wall so they don't shade the rest of the greenhouse.  All the blue panels will be metal roofing with 3" foam board insulation against them and sealed off.  That will be between the trusses, I haven't figured out how or if I'm going to insulate where the truss members will be, it will transfer a lot of cold through in the winter with a foot or more of snow up there, but I still don't think it will be worth trying to insulate under the truss members.

The bigger truss members will be 2x4x1/4" Aluminum, lacing in the truss will be 1.5x1.5 square (also aluminum)

Here's a few pics- Dimensions will be 24' deep, 52' long and about 16' to the peak.  It's being placed about 4' down into the ground so overall height won't be as bad as it looks.

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You can see in this image that I'm way over my member capacity on the vertical piece in the front, but I really think it's a modeling error more than structural.  But it also might need some gussets on the sides of that connection.  I need to play with it and see.  I did just notice that the small concrete wall in front is modeled as a pinned connection instead of fixed, so I'll have to fix that and see what's next.

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I also went out the excavation and used my new total-station to survey my property boundary and make sure I'm off the property line as much as I planned to be and it's just about perfect.  I heard my neighbor out playing with his quad-copter so I called him and asked him to do some flyovers while we were out there, pics or video should be available whenever he gets off his lazy ass and gets them to me.

FOOTINGS!!






And for anyone that remembered that thread about the concrete guy that screwed up a footing I worked on a few weeks ago, here's a footing drop with exactly ZERO structural sunshine.

Build an Israeli style guard tower while you've got the earth opened up.

Can I grow tomatoes in it or is it just good for sniping Palestinians, deer, skunks and other varmints?

Very cool pictures.  Know a girl that lives in Manti.  I love it out there.

Till the money runs out!  

Finally ready to pour walls sometime tomorrow afternoon, if the weather holds.  Since we started this I've had several snow storms and now the rain is starting, so it's somewhat slow going.  Should continue to go slow, I've order all the material for the trusses and now I wait for shipment in about two weeks.







You can see some pink and in some place black pipes in the walls, these will be air venting between my fodder/sprouting room and the main greenhouse.  I've got venting high and low in the fodder room as well as inside and outside, so I should be able to keep a good stream of warm air into the fodder room (requires 70degrees 24/7/365 for best operation).  In the past the problem with good fodder production has been keeping it up to temp in the winter and still providing adequate fresh air.

I also have a large pipe formed in that will act as a chute for fresh barley to be dumped into the room from a tank/bin above.

Interesting project, looking forward to seeing how it works out.

Nice update.

So a pump truck is $450 for a partial day, instead we built a road around my walls with the spoils and I'll just pull all the dirt back up on top of the buried room, but it also makes for a pretty squishy road.  

The concrete company charges $1500 to get a truck unstuck and it almost got to that point today.  We were able to yank the truck back out and get him to the right spot from another approach, then back out again safely.









Concrete is done-  sorta.  Still probably 5 yards left for a couple of full height walls and a backer wall on top of the lid to hold the dirt covering the storage/fodder room

Are you using a passive Slinky?

Tagged.  I have a nice sand hill in my back yard that would look sweet with a 30' long green house dug into the side of it.  

Ive been collecting old windows to build a small (16'x16') one off the south side of my house.  I want to put a concrete floor in it and run pex water line through it and plumb that into a propane hot water heater to heat the floor in the early spring and late fall.  Plus having a propane hot water heater in the green house will generate CO2.  Im still kicking around Ideas though and will look to this thread for inspiration.  

What's a passive slinky?

I have planned to use a few types of both active and passive heating and cooling, that's actually pretty close to the next step too so I'll whip out the MS paint and describe the plan in the next few days

Tag because I'm jealous

A Slinky is a large underground metal coil that collects heat on cool days and helps lose heat on hot days.

I've got a really dumb question. Have you taken air in and air out into the design?  The structure looks awesome but you have to let them breathe. Not poo pooing it just curious.

OST

that is really awesome

I think the answer for both of these is the same-  Sorta and yes.  Wait, that's not the same.

I used This software to help estimate how much ventilation I'd need to use buried pipe heat exchangers to provide fresh air in the greenhouse.  My plan was to run (4) 4" corrugated plastic drain pipes underground for 100ft each, under my back yard and into the front short wall of the greenhouse.  The software results told me that my optimum design would be (6) 8" pipes for 75-100m 1m underground.  So my first guess was probably about 1/4 of the volume they recommended.  But their estimates are intended to heat and cool a house, not a greenhouse.  I'm not sure if the huge increase of glass (polycarbonate) will actually increase the demand for fresh air or if the venting across the top and overall drafty nature of the building will reduce the demand.

Here's some of what I'm thinking-



In the winter we get as low as -24F and in the summer as high as 95F.  If I bury air pipes in the lawn I can raise the temp of my outside air in the winter and lower it in the summer.  I tried this on a smaller scale shed last year and the chimney effect of having a window open was able to draw a lot of fresh air and maintain about 80F at the peak during really how days, that's with both a south and west facing window in the shed and no management, just the natural flow.  This will have a lot more glazing surface, so my (4) 4" pipes is likely not nearly enough.

Below is an aerial photo taken this morning of my lot with the greenhouse.  Yeah, it snowed last night, and dropped to the low teens overnight.

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The green was the intended layout of the 4" pipes, pink is the vents cast into the wall between my sprouting room and the greenhouse.  Red is a large penetration that I'll use to supply grain for the fodder sprouting.  Blue are two outside vents I cast in the exterior wall of the sprouting room.
The yellow is a ductwork that will be about 4' under the top of the grow beds in the greenhouse.  I'll have to use a fan for this, but I'm going to suck the air off the top of the greenhouse and push it underground to heat the dirt through the winter.  A branch of this will be ducted into the fodder room in case I need warmer air.

My intention is to-

Moderate the temps of the air coming into the greenhouse in both summer and winter.
condition the air to 70F and inject it into the fodder room.
cycle the fodder air either back into the greenhouse or outside.

In addition I'll have the top section of the glazed wall will be on an automatic temp controlled opener so the wall at the top 4' will actually change it's angle and open up about 12" all across the top of the greenhouse.  I have my concerns about this-

1- will I open so much that I'll lose my chimney effect
2- will it be a weak (fragile) aspect that will be broken by high winds
3- will I ever actually get all this stuff done

I keep coming back to my basic priorities-

1- the fodder room has to stay 70F, all the time.
2- the greenhouse can't freeze.  I'll have too much tropical stuff in there, it needs to be robust enough that it can get through a week of sub-zero temps without a huge effort from me.  If I have to run some heaters once it a while I'll be sad, I want it to be independent of external heat in the winter.
3- I've seen a lot of greenhouses that either work in spring/fall or winter, but can't run 4 seasons.  I need to be able to dump heat in the summer.

Here's a overhead view of what I am doing with the backfill, which will act as thermal mass for the greenhouse and fodder room.

The yellow is all 8' concrete walls that will be backfilled within the top 8" or so of the top, I won't be insulating the concrete all the way as I want the heat to soak into the dirt, but I will insulate the top 2' or so of the concrete where the dirt isn't thick enough to actually provide much thermal mass.

The brown is a concrete lid over the storage/fodder room.  I'll be putting 6" of foam insulation on top of it and then about 6"-1' of dirt over the top of it.  I don't have the weight capacity for a full 2-3' of dirt and I get the foam insulation really, really cheap through a friend of mine, so this lets me keep the load down to 75-100lbs/sq-ft and still be very insulated on the lid.

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I'll plant the citrus/avocado trees along the back wall of the greenhouse and the kiwi will go against the east wall (right side in the pic).  The rest of the wall space will be reserved to trellis the squash and tomatoes, then all the rest of the table fare in the open section.

I'll also be digging a trench somewhere and covering it over with a grate to act as a cold air well for the cold air to fall into in the winter.  I may plant cold weather crops in it in the summer if I can build it right.

Fodder-

This isn't the most common method of producing animal feed, so I might as well give a little background on it here.

Here's a few pics of a large production facility nearby.  He's producing right about 4,000lbs of sprouted barley each day and feeding about 700 mustangs.  That's not enough fodder, but I don't know how much bailed hay he's also feeding, last I heard he wanted to double his fodder production in order to stop buying hay.

Hard to tell in this pic because the plastic is clean, but the end of the try is butted up against a clear plastic 'wall' that keeps the barley seed from washing off.


This is his recirculation pump for his water.  I don't know why he recirculates it, in my experience unless you are really trying to conserve water it's not worth it.  The water gets really funky really fast and spreads mold and fungi issues.  If you keep it filtered, slightly chlorinated and only recirculate 75% each watering it isn't too bad, but that's a lot of effort and equipment for water that's usually pretty cheap here.



Flunkie loading the tray-


This is the best shot I've got of his finished product.  And imo it's not nearly as good as it could be.  You can see all the unsprouted seed on the bottom of the mat, showing that his germination rate stinks.  Also, he should have a really tight and thick root mat that allows you to pick it up and it's hard to tear.  His root mat is almost non-existant, I think it's because he either waters too often or doesn't have enough angle on the trays to get the water back off.  Also, you can get almost high in the room due to the high oxygen content, so he really needs a better air transfer system than he's using.

.
Another shot of the trays.  He should have a 1-2" thick white layer of roots at the base of these if it was running better.  You can see the poor sprouting rate in the trays to the left, they'll fill in but it takes a few days longer and his overall weight per pound of seed is a lot lower than it could be.


Another shot of one of the three banks of trays.


Here's a few shots of some stuff I have sprouted-




This shows the effect of having poor quality trays that let the water settle into the center and stunting the growth of the seeds.  We also cut it into chunks because cows are retarded and didn't do well on the full biscuit.  If we cut it into bite-sized pieces they did very well.  Horses are smart enough to tear pieces off and they do well without cutting it.


Day 1 (after a 24hr pre-soak in water with just a touch of chlorine (tap water works best))


Day 2


Day 3


Some of the cotton mold issues we've had.  Not sure why they start or why they quit, it seems random, but I do know that when the environment is perfect, water is kept up to proper temps and air is fresh, I seldom have any issue.


This is a batch of barley I got that has a lot of rye in it.  I like it, the rye sprouts very fast and the cows love it.  Straight barley shown for comparison.




Details-

I buy the barley for about $0.08/lb and if everything is perfect (never) you can theoretically get about 12-14lbs of fodder for each pound of dry seed.  We can get up to 10 at times, but average more like 7-8lbs/lb.  
Large animals eat more fodder than dry hay, per pound, because it's wet.  Comparisons to dry hay are a little weird but I'll sum up by saying that when I fed my 1300lb steer nothing but 30lbs of fodder through the heart of the winter, he gained weight.  That means I can put weight on a steer, in the winter, for less cost per month than feeding a small dog.  That's pretty cheap.

This is amazing info.

Thank you for taking the time to post.

Awesome post, I look forward to updates

I don't even have words

Thanks all.

If all goes well I'll be able to more or less feed my family (7 kids) for about $250 in barley a year.  That will feed us all our beef, chicken, eggs, turkey, veggies and some fruit.  The weak spot is dairy because I used to work on a dairy and I refuse to own a milk cow.  I have my standards.

The greenhouse will provide veggies and some fruit, fodder will feed all the animals. Still need a way to easily produce my own oils and fats, but I'm not really trying to be 100% independent, just having fun.

A few years ago I bought 46k pounds of barley and found they adjusted their combine poorly (I bought straight from the farmer) and it was threshed so badly my sprouting rate went down the pooper.  This year I'm trying to buy another 46k+\- and am already talking to farmers about how they can provide what I need.

I'll have to get some pics of how I'm handling long and short term storage of the grain if anyone is interested.

This is amazing keep up the posts

Awesome post!!!  Please keep us updated.

This is going to be a weed thread---or a poop thread.  Not sure which.

I do: I'm jealous!

I'm just here to gawk and borrow ideas!

because you forgot to spec the structural sunshine.

If this isn't a nasa project,  you price tag won't even come close.

I actually have a legit structural sunshine problem that I need to figure out pronto.  I'll write something up on it later today.




This is the most expensive greenhouse in the WORLD, not space!