Project Overview
Information Products
Commodities
Practices
- Crop Production: high tunnels or hoop houses
- Energy: geothermal
Summary:
The primary benefits of this project will focus on improved income and profitability and improved market opportunity for local production of primarily leafy greens in high tunnels. Our strategy to achieve this end is through better control of temperature and humidity throughout the year without using expensive and fossil fuel energy intensive heat sources. The objective is to use buried water pipe to store or extract ground heat beneath a high tunnel greenhouse and water-to-air heat exchangers at the surface to convey heat to the growing space. Periodic temperature fluctuations due to changing ambient conditions including night temperatures dropping as low as -30 degrees F in northern Iowa necessitate supplemental heat or adequate heat storage and heat recovery capacity. Especially in northern climates, supplemental heat can be prohibitively expensive during the heart of winter. Reversing water flow direction for ground heat extraction from the direction used for heat storage should create a beneficial temperature gradient. Enhancing the capacity to use ground storage to buffer daily and periodic temperature and humidity swings and attain higher winter night temperatures is especially important when potentially lethal cold temperatures can occur.
Project objectives:
The objectives are to: 1) Adequately size, creatively design, and effectively operate a system to convey heat to and from the ground beneath a high tunnel to the growing space using water pipe for the ground loop and water-to-air heat exchangers in the growing space. 2) Measure the magnitude of the heat gradient created by reversing water flow direction during storage and extraction of heat in the ground loop and the effectiveness of that gradient to buffer temperature and humidity. 3) To convey the experience and lessons learned to the public and other growers in meetings, articles, and social media.