Saturday, October 22, 2011

Building a greenhouse at Dirksen Hall

We are soon running out of time for Rufino Caniz to be in the USA.  He will return to Gautemala in mid-November.  The heavy rains that hit his home town did a lot of damage to some of his property and I know he wants to return home to his wife and help fix his property.  International travel is a lot of fun until something happens and you realize just how far away you are and how helpless you feel.  Friday after work, Steve Flinn and I worked on adding a few boards and the visqueen to the framework of the solar greenhouse and if we can move the solar soda can collector to Dirksen, get some steel posts in the ground to support it, and run some duct work in the greenhouse, hook up the PVpanels to run the small fans, we are ready to gather some data and see how well it will dry some corn.  That work should go pretty fast.  I do have some people that can help. We just have to see how it is going to work and how well it will hold up to the elements.  We can learn from our mistakes and make improvements.  More important, by having something built we can gather ideas from others.  I already had a faculty member suggest that we try and construct a rotating drum to see if that can speed up the drying process and cut down the space we need.  He had a good idea for one.  We can see how that will work later.
As for the greenhouse project, a week ago it looked like this.
The frame work had been built and everything was loaded in my van.  Under the pile of metal and wood is another coffee dryer model that we will put together as soon as we get the larger green house model up and running. 
Friday, with the help of Steve Flinn, this pile of steel and wood turned in to this.
This is the side facing south and the left side of this panel is the door to enter.  It is just two flaps of visqueen held shut by welding magnets.  On the right side we will place the solar soda can collector and that heat exchanger will dump hot air into the greenhouse at the top corner.  We will probably run a small PV (photovoltaic) fan to help move the air.  We will see if we need to do that once everything is in place.  We will also have a PV fan at the back opposite corner to move air so the green house does not get to hot.
I have some more pictures to add but for some strange reason the open file is just rotating and I am not able to do that at this time.

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