Sui and I had talked about getting a greenhouse for years, as her primary hobby is gardening. We’ve got collections of plants under solar lights and crammed by windows inside the house, and every year we drag out dozens of plants in the spring and back in for the fall, but had nothing outdoors to extend the growing season. Finally, Sui found an inexpensive greenhouse on-line and decided it was time.

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It is fall, so there is little inside except for plants that normally sit outside in a tent style greenhouse for the winter. The floor isn’t done in this picture, and it needs shelves installed. We put in crushed stones since this was taken. I’ve also added insulation along the south wall and roof to keep in some heat during the night.

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Solar Power... in more than the obvious way

On top of our shed is a small 50 watt solar panel which charges a battery by day. The 12 VDC is then fed into the greenhouse and powers a small monitoring system which connects to the house LAN via WiFi. Every 5 minutes, MRTG uses SNMP to grab the current temperature and humidity and graphs it for us. Okay, so how many people do you know who have a WiFi connection to their greenhouse which uses SNMP to communicate the conditions inside the greenhouse? This is the kind of bad stuff that happens when two software engineers with embedded systems backgrounds get married. Next project is an app for our iPhones to watch the data :)