**Our website is still very much under construction! Please excuse our site's shortcomings. **

Welcome to Klinkman Solar, your value leader for greenhouses. Our patent-pending greenhouse retains its heat far better than almost all greenhouses on the market, so that you're not paying for heat. 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 ten times direct sunlight through our window.

Sales advantages versus all-glass or plastic greenhouses

Our greenhouse has a "wow!" effect on visitors. It's the forefront of solar technology. Someday, all greenhouses will use solar concentrators.

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

You don't have to throw away plastic and frozen crops after a bad storm. For comparison, below is our good neighbor's plastic greenhouse.

With glass greenhouses, the owner pays for heating the greenhouse at night and on cloudy days. Our greenhouses are warm in winter, well insulated and full of sunlight. Glass and plastic greenhouses are poorly insulated.

Here's a link to the current NYMEX price per barrel of oil. Notice how the selling price of oil steadily inches up in the future? A fuel-free sustainable greenhouse is a good way to prepare for a possible oil shortage. Wherever there is crisis, there is also opportunity,

A local grower's Mexico and Florida competition needs diesel fuel to truck green, cardboard tomatoes up to the Frost Belt.

Our reflectors reach up and over the greenhouse. Reflectors are more sun-efficient than south walls in tree-shaded and urban settings.

Traditional greenhouses provide only 75% of outdoor winter sunlight to grow various crops. Normal crops can suffer or fail in weak winter sun. We put about 40 feet (south to north) of winter sunlight into our 16 foot wide (south to north) greenhouse. Up to a living plant's limits, more sun in winter equals bigger crops and more money earned per square foot of greenhouse. Traditional greenhouses just don't compare in sun strength to our greenhouses. If you desire less sun on shade tolerant crops, try a shade cloth.

Plastic greenhouses require that you replace the greenhouse’s petroleum-based vinyl chloride skin every four years or so, or whenever wind or heavy snow loads destroy the plastic.

When heated by sunlight, some plastic greenhouses may leach toxic plasticizer chemicals (phthalates) from their plastic skin into the greenhouse’s enclosed atmosphere, and then into any food being grown inside the greenhouse. We will integrate our sustainable greenhouses with your current set of greenhouses, but our own toxics reduction director doesn't recommend any of the plastic kind.

Insulated solid walls and roofs are less expensive to construct, per square foot of surface, than high-performance windows. Solid roofs can protect your crops from heavy snow collapses and from freezing temperatures after wind-related punctures. Why take unnecessary risks with your crops? You have customers counting on you to be dependable.

We build long-lasting, sustainable greenhouses. Our SIPP construction is standard for buildings. Our windows are under eaves so that they don't leak and are not exposed to hailstones. Our glass reflectors are typically set at a 45 degree angle, which reduces damage from large hail, but we recommend that they be turned vertical if large hail is forecast, and turned near-horizontal for surviving small hurricanes. We have yet to break a reflector pane in use, and we expect to further increase our reflector breaking strength standards for our customers. By the way, reflector panes are designed to be easily replaced.

Periodic extermination of bugs with freezing cold in winter or with extreme heat in summer will help to reduce or eliminate pesticide use. Window screens will help in summer. Most types of bugs don't like to live in greenhouses.

One tactic in using a greenhouse is to give seedlings a month or two of a headstart on summer. Growing sprouts in a high-efficiency greenhouse may be combined with growing seedlings in a low-efficiency greenhouse to produce a huge number of large seedling plants all ready for the planting season.

Grant money may be available now for building this innovative, transformative solar application. Below are a few leads:

2/1/10 "Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch today announced that his office is accepting grant applications from Rhode Island nonprofits that would implement, subsidize or create programs to improve the health and/or nutritional needs of residents of the state. The grants will be funded by Rhode Island’s share of settlement funds, about $103,000, resulting from a multistate class action settlement on behalf of consumers and businesses victimized by an alleged vitamins price-fixing conspiracy."
http://www.ri.gov/press/view/10626

Next, for rural growers and for rural retail plant sellers, one round of USDA applications for solarizing projects is due in March of 2010, and another round in June of 2010. Nothing from this July until March of 2011, so don't be late.

Finally, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and 48 other states have ARRA stimulus money right now. If you are a Community Action Program, you can ask for funds for a community garden greenhouse. Other matches are possible. I know that as of 2/1/10, Rhode Island ARRA requests need to go in quickly. Will you be fast enough?

 

Gardener's Blog

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.