Greenhouse is still working. But I had the microcontroller that controls the climate somehow die. It’s an arduino and suddenly it stopped connecting via serial to the laptop. It must have been fried somehow because I couldn’t connect it again. Anyhow I got it back up and running with a new microcontroller in the middle of the night and it all looks ok. Except that that new micro-controller didn’t work properly on pin 13 for controlling the fans. Anyhow, we limped along until the replacement parts I ordered came and now it’s all working fine and none of the electronics are held together with hot glue. I also had one of the exhaust fans stop working, probably from being exposed to the weather. I’m not sure I’ll fix that right now though because the weather is colder and I rarely need a lot of cooling power.
The weather has been kind of dim, not a lot of light available, so we’ll see how that influences production. I put white high albedo plastic on the south side of the greenhouse to try to reflect more light into the greenhouse on dim days. It seems to help some. Today there is blue sky and the south wall sensor is reading 700 watts of total solar power transmitted per m2. That’s a ton, hopefully the tomatoes can use it all. If this works ok all winter we may want to breed a new cultivar of tomato that can handle extreme changes in illumination well.
I also ran the simulation of tomato yield, vs the experimental harvest. This isn’t perfect because I didn’t have the data from the very beginning of the tomato planting since I was still building the weighing platforms. So I padded it with 41 days of sept 29th. As time goes on the simulation will be less sensitive to those initial conditions and hopefully in January it will be fine. At the moment is seems ok though, cumulative yield is matching up well even if the simulation said that harvests should have started earlier. Some of that is the problem of when is a tomato ripe and ready to harvest? I try to pick at a consistent red colour but that is my subjective colour sensing. Perhaps I should get a paint chip to compare it to…
Sun Aquasystems 