I'm Paul Klinkman. My partner is Scot Comey. Together we have invented a greenhouse (and possibly more applications soon) which concentrates sunlight into the greenhouse and loses little heat at night. Our patent-pending greenhouse retains its heat for days. The goal is crops without any fuel at all most winters. Here's Paul Klinkman inside the greenhouse on January 16, 2010, with a snowball.

This closeup shows 78 degrees on the greenhouse's inside thermometer.

Our secret is sunlight concentration. We aim at least five times direct sunlight through our target window.

We're coming out with a number of products for a number of uses.

--Our low-tech agricultural greenhouse is economically quite competitive over its lifetime, easy to understand and use, low-maintenance and sustainable (long life, toxics reduction both in construction and eventual replacement of the greenhouse).

--In development is a medium-tech greenhouse with solar trackers for higher performance, and a completely high-tech version that controls the greenhouse's heat, the vents and periodic irrigation.

--Clients have asked us, "Can you heat my hoop houses?" Yes, but any solar engineer will advise a client to insulate and save energy first. We know of growers who grow under electric lamps in insulated buildings. They're paying for light but they're saving some money on heat. Our greenhouses have excellent insulation, which saves a great deal of money, and concentrated sunshine which is then diffused onto crops, which saves somewhat less money. For customers who want to use their existing buildings at 35 degrees in January, we're developing a standalone system that stores solar heat on demand. However, one of our beefed up greenhouse units will also store quite a bit of heat, and its extra heat can probably maintain 35 degrees in a second greenhouse in the Rhode Island area starting in late February.

One tactic in using a combination greenhouse is to give seedlings a two or three month headstart on spring. Growing sprouts in a high-efficiency greenhouse in February may be combined with growing seedlings in a connected low-efficiency greenhouse in March and April to produce a huge number of large seedlings all ready for the planting season.

Our greenhouse has a "wow!" effect on visitors. Scot reports that the greenhouse is often warmer, sunnier and nicer than his house's environment, so he spent quite a bit of time in the greenhouse in February. We believe that we're at the forefront of solar technology. Someday, all greenhouses and all houses will use solar concentrators.

Our greenhouse gets more out of poor sunlight. Customers pay less for our far smaller window surfaces, and you don't pay for heat losses through those surfaces at night.

Our solar reflector design reaches up and over trees that would otherwise block a solar installation. We aim to supply more diffused light to the plants than hoop houses can supply, for more product per square foot.

Insulated solid walls and roofs are less expensive to construct, per square foot of wall or roof, than high-performance windows. A solid roof will protect a client's crops from heavy snow collapses and from freezing air leaking in after wind-related punctures. Our clients have customers counting on them to be dependable.

 

 

Gardener's Blog

May 24, 2010

Excuse me for being late. The tomatoes and some broccoli seedlings went into a garden in Pawtucket. I'll post a picture soon.

We both had pretty brown thumbs and made easily correctable errors. At first we didn't get around to getting a temperature activated vent opener and installing it on the wall. Instead Scot was opening the greenhouse door a crack and putting the tomatoes and that good rose bush on the floor. Second, we frequently let the tomatoes cool off to below 50 degrees, which shut down their growth. Third, after cooking a couple of brave tomatoes, we took the other extreme and didn't diffuse sunlight down to the floor properly. Result: small tomato seedlings. We've handed them over to a competent gardener who put half gallon milk bottles over the small ones. Finally, we have a competent solar architect who is steering us toward a proper amount of heat storage (gravel on the floor) and cost-effective SIPP building construction.

Please excuse our obvious gardening errors. When inventors are looking at the sky they step in too many puddles.

These problems are easily correctable, and we'll make sure that the next gardener learns from our mistakes.

Sat. April 10, 2010

When I looked in, the greenhouse interior had dried out nicely. I found a high water line of grass clippings one foot up our reflectors. Our greenhouse is no ordinary building because it heats up with plenty of strength! Also we had no problem being underwater because the solar heating system isn't electric-based. Well, Scot did pull the plug on an air circulation fan in the greenhouse.

We hit 92 degrees last Tuesday, with no leaf buds on the trees. Talk about climate change! The door was open two inches and the greenhoue had its thermal mass (water drums and floor bricks for this prototype) so it was still 80 degrees inside when it was a bit hotter outside. This raises the question for us of how well a smart greenhouse can stay cool in July, storing up the night's cooler temperatures.

The tomatoes got bigger.

Tues. March 30, 2010

Scot still hasn't had time to install the automatic vent. He's been leaving the door open an inch or two on every sunny day. It has gotten as hot as 95 degrees inside but that's rare.

We lost about 20% of our tomatoes and damaged another 20% with the heat/sun. Well, we have brown thumbs. The other tomatoes look good. Our latest temperature readings over the last month show tempered heat during the day and never below 50 degrees at night. We did have a 21 degree night one night in March.

One of the roses inside has a bud that should bloom in a couple of days. That's another market -- flowers on, say, Feb. 14.

Now for the news! As I write, Scot reports that the floor of our greenhouse is underwater. We have had 100 year record rain, something like 7 inches in 2 days and 15 inches this month. Scot's field floods every so often. We built our prototype up on blocks two feet above the ground, and we still flooded.

Tomorrow we find out how fast our greenhouse dries out with concentrated solar heating. That's the silver lining. Also our tomatoes got watered but we didn't need that..

Sat. Feb 20, 2010

Way too hot today! 96 degrees. It's getting to our broccoli seedlings. There is such a thing as letting a little cool air in, and that's what we'll have to do.

Scot's sprouts came up. At least some plants like the heat. Ignore that tomato next to the sprouts -- that's a newcomer.

Wed. Feb. 10, 2010

We completely missed the Washington D.C. blizzard but got no sun that day and had a big bitter cold wind that night. No problem. Note: the coolest spot in the greenhouse is right under the windowsill at night, where window-cooled air flows downward. Anyways, my issues are with plants getting the right amount of light. I'm an amateur gardener and I have no courage!

The whole greenhouse is pretty light but the back wall gets direct sun. Most plants are on the floor out of direct sun, where they've survived but haven't thrived. I put two plants in a hanging basket where they get perhaps doubled sun for an hour. The Romaine in the basket has burned off its two baby leaves but has sent up this particularly strong-looking regular leaf. The broccoli plant's leaves look rather small compared with my control group in the window at home, and same-sized as the floor seedlings.

What I need to do next is nail up a rack for plants. On the wall they'll be in direct sun for 3-4 hours a day, (plus all the indirect sun zinging around the greenhouse) high on the back wall. I'll try a shade cloth over a few of the volunteers. Another option: reflect in more sun from our unused corners. This particular prototype is funny-shaped.

The little fan broke a week ago. Our greenhouse is so warm and dry inside (80 Tuesday at 3:00 pm), and we have relatively so little greenery inside, that perhaps we will never see any leaf mold.

Jeannie will not release her tomato seedlings to me until they're really bushy, in a week she says.

Sun. Jan. 31, 2010

In outdoor news, we just suffered through what channel 6 called a "Wicked Cold Alert". Wind chills were below zero on 1/29. We had gusts of over 40 mph late on 1/28 and through the afternoon of 1/29. Local temperatue highs/lows were 33/19 on 1/28/10, 17/8 on 1/29/10 and 19/3 on 1/30/10 per weatherunderground.com.

In indoor news, two of our broccoli sprouts were found underwatered on 1/31. The leaves dried up to maybe half an inch down the little shoots. Oops! The bigger picture is that we had no frost inside the greenhouse! Victory! No-heat as usual. We probably won't have such a good freezeout test of our greenhouse for the rest of the winter. Note: our architect's design is expected to perform far better than than this test greenhouse.

Sat. Jan 23, 2010

The seedlings I transplanted and left in the greenhouse last Thursday have not dried up. They have perked up a bit. I have broccoli and Romaine in OG potting soil. The tomatoes are still in Jeannie's basement.

For Sale in April, 2010
Our Modular Greenhouse and Reflectors

Our greenhouse SIPP modules are 16' x 16'. If you want a roughly 100' greenhouse, we would sell and install 7 greenhouse modules with two end walls, for a 108' by 16' greenhouse.

Our metal reflectors come in 10' wide modules. For a 108'' long greenhouse we would recommend 12 reflector modules.

Our greenhouses come with insulated gravel floors. The gravel acts as thermal storage. If you need one or more insulated ponds dug into the floor of the greenhouse, we can supply these.

Greenhouses need electricity for fans, to fight leaf mold, and plants need water. We expect that many growers will contract for inexpensive local plumbing and electrical work, or some growers will do most of the electrical work themselves and then have an experienced electrician check their work.

Our goal is to concentrate the sunlight that would land on a 40 foot wide piece of flat land into our 16 foot greenhouse. Concentrating 80 feet of sun width into a 32 foot wide greenhouse requires much taller, and more expensive, reflectors. That's why we don't sell extra-wide greenhouses. If you want a 32' wide greenhouse, consider erecting two parallel 16' greenhouses instead.

We eventually expect to have two distinct products. Our agricultural model follows the Maytag philosophy. It has very few moving parts. It maximizes a professional grower's profits and is designed to survive anything. Our well-automated model won't be out until 2011.

We apologize for our close-to-the-vest style right now. We're the industry innovators, and even well-designed hedges of patents give us limited protection against competitors, so we regretfully must allow potential competitors to discover a number of issues with solar concentration on their own. Rest assured, we have good solutions.