Sorry again for the lack of timely updates. The tomatoes are doing well and have now the beginning of buds. Soon I’ll have to plant them into the big rockwool slabs. The trays that hold the slabs and weigh them have been a big problem. No matter what I’ve tried I can’t get the HX711 breakout board to operate reliably to read the load cells (scale) with arduinos. 75% of them (from different sources and with different layouts) don’t work out of the box and when I do have it working it will often just stop. So, I ordered a usb load cell reader which should allow me to read the load cells from the laptop directly. I’m not an electrical engineer by any means but it all seems like it should just work. Anyhow the usb load cell reader should come on monday so I’ll try that, and hopefully I won’t have to plant before then.
The weather has been odd. No rain but hot and humid everyday. My well pump broke, maybe due to low water levels, and the misting cooling doesn’t work when it’s this humid. I’ve kept it below 33c in the greenhouse with shading so far though. In the final version, the glazing insulation will be useful for shading too.
I did develop a technique to weld or at least spot weld 6-mil polyethylene sheets with my soldering iron. These are silage cover plastic or home construction vapor barriers. The plan is to make a blanket out of these insulated with fiberglass batts. Then it can be rolled up and down over the glazing for good insulation at night.
Sun Aquasystems 