My New Rion Greenhouse

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KDePetrillo North Scituate, RI(Zone 6a) Sep 09, 2004

I'm fairly new to this site, and I've found your postings very helpful. I've had a greenhouse for about 15 years, and only THIS PAST WINTER did I realize that all my problems are directly related to my Yankee cheapness: I refused to heat the GH to more than 50 degrees, and many of my plants suffered and/or died. I thought it was because the greenhouse didn't get enough light, and it took me 15 years to figure out it was the insufficient heat.

The 15 year old GH is a Janco double-walled glass lean-to. It's 10 x 13, and when it was first built, I thought I'd wasted a LOT of money: "I'll never use all this space!" I thought. Within 6 months I was having trouble finding room for my plants, and I after hours of begging and pleading and nagging, my husband put shelving up in every available space. I managed with that until last winter, when I somehow acquired over 130 orchids. There will be no room this fall when I move all the orchids into the greenhouse (they've almost all been repotted and take up a LOT more space than they did when I first bought them in itty-bitty pots), so I finally decided I'd have to shell out some money for a second GH.

The Rion was a pain in the butt at first: after about 4 hours of pouring over the directions and scratching our heads in confusion, we got the hang of it and it wasn't difficult. One MAJOR problem: we misread the directions and put the roof on before the side walls, and had to remove the roof. And I dropped it, but there was no damage. It seems very tight and sturdy (we didn't buy the base offered -- we used 6 x 6s and 8 x 8s), and I have high hopes for it.

My dilemma now is: how to heat it. My husband wants me to buy an electric heater for the first winter to see how the electric bill is affected. We seem to have a lot of power outages, and I'll need a back-up anyway -- so I want to get a propane heater.

Does anyone in Zone 5/6 or colder heat with electricity or propane? I could really use some feedback on this. The nights here are getting much cooler, and I have to make some kind of decision within the next couple of weeks.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

- Kathleen

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crestedchik Cedar Key, FL(Zone 9a) Sep 09, 2004

I've been heating my GH with propane ...
but its attached to my garage
and the furnace is in there(the garage)
and I have a furnace in the house that uses the same propane
There are some months that it kinda gets out of control
and I open and pay the propane bill before my DH see's it
The most we used in a month was 380 gallons
But you figure we get -20 to -25 for days at a time too....

We are now on budget billing....LOL

but I have a 10 X 20 GH and its just 6 mil UV plastic doubled with a fan
Your's would probably not use as much

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