I installed 2 viewing windows in my 1000 gallon stock tank for the aquaponic system.
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Showing posts with label window. Show all posts
Showing posts with label window. Show all posts
Geodesic Dome Greenhouse Part 12 THE END
This is the final video about construction the aquaponic geodesic dome greenhouse. Dont worry, there are still more videos about the aquaponic system and other projects were working on!
Hi Everyone. I’m Rob Torcellini from Bigelow Brook Farm. This is the last video on the series on building the geodesic dome. I wanted to thank you for watching all of these. I’ve had a great time of the last year building this. Learned a lot, made a few mistakes along the way, but overall, it came out pretty good!
I’m planning on do a short series of videos about how I set up the aquaponics system inside the dome.
I also had this camera shoot about 1500 photos of the entire project that will be in a time-lapsed video.
Again, thanks for watching and we’ll see you soon!
It’s starting to get a bit warm in here so it’s time to add some vents. I started by building frames that would fit loosely inside various areas around the dome. There will be a total of five vents and each section will be able to swing open and closed.
Next I removed the existing polycarbonate glazing and then attached the new frame to the dome with a couple of standard door hinges. In order to get the glazing to fit back into its spot properly, I had to cut it down a bit so that it wouldn’t hit against the hinges or the surrounding polycarbonate when the vent was closed.
I simply held the polycarbonate into the new frame and screwed it into place with the washer-backed screws and the vent was done. The remaining 4 vents installed the same way, but just a bit trickier for 2 of them since they were 15 feet off the ground.
All of the exterior joints needed to be sealed to help prevent the rain from leaking in between each joint. I used a clear polyurethane tape which is used as a protective tape on the edge of aircraft wings and wind turbines. If it’s good enough to hold on to a wing at 500 miles per hour in the rain, it just may be good enough on the dome. It was easy to apply by just removing the backing and pressing it down with a j-roller. Once it bonds with the polycarbonate, it’s basically impossible to remove. After covering each joint I drove a washer backed screw through the tape and polycarbonate.
Wherever there is a vent opening, I applied the tape to the polycarbonate and cedar which created a channel for the water to drain from. I’m not sure how well the tape will bond to the wood…only time will tell.
Applying the tape on the upper areas of the dome proved to be a bit trickier. I found it to be unnerving being up there with the risk of sliding over the side or dropping through a section of polycarbonate. I’m happy to say there were no trips to the hospital for this project!
I wanted to use some of the logs that I cut down last year from the site in a couple of areas of the dome and for grow beds for the aquaponic system. My neighbor stopped by with his WoodMeiser saw mill and milled roughly 1500 feet of white pine into 1 inch and half inch thick boards. It was a great way to save some money instead of buying lumber and we got to use some logs that would have gone to waste.
Inside the dome I covered the walls with some of the half-inch pine boards. Each piece is roughly fitted, measured for the proper angle, and cut to size. Sometimes the pieces had to be cut a few times to fit properly. It was a very tedious process cutting all the angles, but the end result looks great!
In the shed area, I only filled the walls with one inch of foam to save a little money. The rest of the wall cavities are filled with regular fiberglass insulation. The boards on these walls installed much quicker since there are long and have square cuts!
The ice and water shield held up well through the winter but it was time to shingle the roof. A friend of mine volunteered his crew to help out which was much appreciated. Even for a professional builder, there was a lot of pondering on how to lay the shingles on the dome area.
On the south side of the greenhouse, I leveled and planted timothy grass. Eventually, this area will used as a small orchard. A local arborist was more than happy to get rid of their wood chips so I was able to spread this on the remaining areas that didn’t have any top soil.
The shed area and dome knee-wall is sided with cedar shakes. They require little maintenance and they help to give a contemporary building a little New England feel. I also added a small awning over the main entrance to make the building less….boring.
That’s about it. There will still be more videos in the future. If you have questions or comments, please leave them in the comments section below and I’ll try to address them in future videos. Thanks for watching!
Read More..
Hi Everyone. I’m Rob Torcellini from Bigelow Brook Farm. This is the last video on the series on building the geodesic dome. I wanted to thank you for watching all of these. I’ve had a great time of the last year building this. Learned a lot, made a few mistakes along the way, but overall, it came out pretty good!
I’m planning on do a short series of videos about how I set up the aquaponics system inside the dome.
I also had this camera shoot about 1500 photos of the entire project that will be in a time-lapsed video.
Again, thanks for watching and we’ll see you soon!
It’s starting to get a bit warm in here so it’s time to add some vents. I started by building frames that would fit loosely inside various areas around the dome. There will be a total of five vents and each section will be able to swing open and closed.
Next I removed the existing polycarbonate glazing and then attached the new frame to the dome with a couple of standard door hinges. In order to get the glazing to fit back into its spot properly, I had to cut it down a bit so that it wouldn’t hit against the hinges or the surrounding polycarbonate when the vent was closed.
I simply held the polycarbonate into the new frame and screwed it into place with the washer-backed screws and the vent was done. The remaining 4 vents installed the same way, but just a bit trickier for 2 of them since they were 15 feet off the ground.
All of the exterior joints needed to be sealed to help prevent the rain from leaking in between each joint. I used a clear polyurethane tape which is used as a protective tape on the edge of aircraft wings and wind turbines. If it’s good enough to hold on to a wing at 500 miles per hour in the rain, it just may be good enough on the dome. It was easy to apply by just removing the backing and pressing it down with a j-roller. Once it bonds with the polycarbonate, it’s basically impossible to remove. After covering each joint I drove a washer backed screw through the tape and polycarbonate.
Wherever there is a vent opening, I applied the tape to the polycarbonate and cedar which created a channel for the water to drain from. I’m not sure how well the tape will bond to the wood…only time will tell.
Applying the tape on the upper areas of the dome proved to be a bit trickier. I found it to be unnerving being up there with the risk of sliding over the side or dropping through a section of polycarbonate. I’m happy to say there were no trips to the hospital for this project!
I wanted to use some of the logs that I cut down last year from the site in a couple of areas of the dome and for grow beds for the aquaponic system. My neighbor stopped by with his WoodMeiser saw mill and milled roughly 1500 feet of white pine into 1 inch and half inch thick boards. It was a great way to save some money instead of buying lumber and we got to use some logs that would have gone to waste.
Inside the dome I covered the walls with some of the half-inch pine boards. Each piece is roughly fitted, measured for the proper angle, and cut to size. Sometimes the pieces had to be cut a few times to fit properly. It was a very tedious process cutting all the angles, but the end result looks great!
In the shed area, I only filled the walls with one inch of foam to save a little money. The rest of the wall cavities are filled with regular fiberglass insulation. The boards on these walls installed much quicker since there are long and have square cuts!
The ice and water shield held up well through the winter but it was time to shingle the roof. A friend of mine volunteered his crew to help out which was much appreciated. Even for a professional builder, there was a lot of pondering on how to lay the shingles on the dome area.
On the south side of the greenhouse, I leveled and planted timothy grass. Eventually, this area will used as a small orchard. A local arborist was more than happy to get rid of their wood chips so I was able to spread this on the remaining areas that didn’t have any top soil.
The shed area and dome knee-wall is sided with cedar shakes. They require little maintenance and they help to give a contemporary building a little New England feel. I also added a small awning over the main entrance to make the building less….boring.
That’s about it. There will still be more videos in the future. If you have questions or comments, please leave them in the comments section below and I’ll try to address them in future videos. Thanks for watching!
Adding Automatic Vent Openers
I finally get to work on some of the more exciting things in the dome. Automation!!! I love being lazy!
A few years ago I made up some vent openers which use windshield wiper motors. They work well for the small greenhouse, but the frames have had some structural problems in strong winds. For the dome greenhouse I’m using linear actuators to operate the vents. The actuators have a lot more lifting strength and can withstand stronger wind forces.
To attach the actuator to the window frame, I took a piece of angle iron and made a cross brace. The brace will fit about half-way up the vent. I cut off a section from each end so that there were tabs that would be used for bolting the brace into the face of the vent frame. I then welded a couple of tabs into the bracket which provided the connection linkage for the actuator. After rounding over the edges and cleaning up some of the welds, the bracket was attached to the vent frame.
The rest of the braces are standard steel bar stock that are bent at slight angles. There are four of them which go from the greenhouse struts to the back side of the actuator. Because of the odd angles of the dome, a few of braces need to be bent as compound angles. If this was a traditional vent the angles would have been much simpler bends.
I temporarily bolt the top brackets to the back side of the actuator and mark where the brackets connect into the dome’s strut. It wasn’t necessary, but I set the actuator to be level when it was closed, simply for aesthetics. I drilled out the first hole in the dome strut and attached the bracket. Once the pieces start to hold themselves in place, it’s much easier to mark and attach the remaining brackets.
The bottom brackets are marked and installed the same way. It’s just a bit more critical to make sure they are placed properly so that the vent is pulled completely closed when the actuator is fully retracted. Once all four brackets are secured, the pyramid shape from the triangulation creates a sturdy mount for the actuator.
Now that it’s fully assembled, a quick test is in order. All the pieces are cleaned and painted to give the system a nice new look! Once the paint is dried, it’s a quick reassembly and then time to it get wired to the controller.
A regular two-conductor wire is used for each actuator and each vent opener has a line that runs back to the controller. The actuators have built in limit switches which stop the motors automatically. To open and close the vent, you just have to reverse the polarity of the power in the wire.
The thermostat controller is a prototype six-relay control unit that can be programmed to set each vent to open on independent temperatures. The unit can be programmed to sample the temperature at predetermined intervals and also delay the change between relays so that all the vent motors aren’t running at the same time. This keeps the unit from drawing too much power all at once. Each relay can also be disabled and forced into an open or closed position. There are more details about the thermostat in the description area of this video.
Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to “thumbs up” this video if you want to see more like it in the future and feel free to leave comments too.
Read More..
A few years ago I made up some vent openers which use windshield wiper motors. They work well for the small greenhouse, but the frames have had some structural problems in strong winds. For the dome greenhouse I’m using linear actuators to operate the vents. The actuators have a lot more lifting strength and can withstand stronger wind forces.
To attach the actuator to the window frame, I took a piece of angle iron and made a cross brace. The brace will fit about half-way up the vent. I cut off a section from each end so that there were tabs that would be used for bolting the brace into the face of the vent frame. I then welded a couple of tabs into the bracket which provided the connection linkage for the actuator. After rounding over the edges and cleaning up some of the welds, the bracket was attached to the vent frame.
The rest of the braces are standard steel bar stock that are bent at slight angles. There are four of them which go from the greenhouse struts to the back side of the actuator. Because of the odd angles of the dome, a few of braces need to be bent as compound angles. If this was a traditional vent the angles would have been much simpler bends.
I temporarily bolt the top brackets to the back side of the actuator and mark where the brackets connect into the dome’s strut. It wasn’t necessary, but I set the actuator to be level when it was closed, simply for aesthetics. I drilled out the first hole in the dome strut and attached the bracket. Once the pieces start to hold themselves in place, it’s much easier to mark and attach the remaining brackets.
The bottom brackets are marked and installed the same way. It’s just a bit more critical to make sure they are placed properly so that the vent is pulled completely closed when the actuator is fully retracted. Once all four brackets are secured, the pyramid shape from the triangulation creates a sturdy mount for the actuator.
Now that it’s fully assembled, a quick test is in order. All the pieces are cleaned and painted to give the system a nice new look! Once the paint is dried, it’s a quick reassembly and then time to it get wired to the controller.
A regular two-conductor wire is used for each actuator and each vent opener has a line that runs back to the controller. The actuators have built in limit switches which stop the motors automatically. To open and close the vent, you just have to reverse the polarity of the power in the wire.
The thermostat controller is a prototype six-relay control unit that can be programmed to set each vent to open on independent temperatures. The unit can be programmed to sample the temperature at predetermined intervals and also delay the change between relays so that all the vent motors aren’t running at the same time. This keeps the unit from drawing too much power all at once. Each relay can also be disabled and forced into an open or closed position. There are more details about the thermostat in the description area of this video.
Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to “thumbs up” this video if you want to see more like it in the future and feel free to leave comments too.
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