I spent a lot of time messing with this greenhouse fan – a lot, like the better part of three days. I googled a million things, I texted my friend who is an electrical engineer, I twisted and untwisted and retwisted wires (luckily without electrocuting myself), I emailed the old owners, and I called the manufacturer. See, I was convinced that the vent in one of the greenhouses was installed backwards, or the fan ran the wrong way. The way the fan works it sucks hot air out of the greenhouse, but the vent opens outward, meaning that it doesn’t open automatically when the fan turns on. In fact it becomes harder to open it since the fan is sucking it closed. I rigged the door to swing open when the fan turns on, and I figured that there was something wrong with the set up of the fan and the vent since they didn’t work in the same way.
It turns out that I was wrong – the fans are only meant to run in exhaust mode and the vent is supposed to open against this flow because if the vent opens inward, a stiff wind could blow open the vent and ruin the temperature control. Apparently we are missing a crucial piece of the greenhouse set-up which automatically opens the vent right before the fan turns on.
So lessons learned?
- Sometimes calling people is much easier than trying to research things yourself on the internet. Sure there was a lot of information out there, but some of it wasn’t relevant, was hard to understand, or was just plain wrong. Adding to that was the fact that I wasn’t even entirely certain what I was even looking for – was it the fan or the vent that was wrong? But one call to Dave at the ACME Fan and Greenhouse supply company had me straightened out.
- Drawing electrical diagrams is HARD! This is not pretty:
- Sometimes things don’t need fixing. Technically the fan/vent set up is completely correct, minus the missing part. But….
Lessons NOT learned:
- I’m still not 100% convinced that it is correct! (I know, I am a very hard-headed, stubborn know-it-all!). I understand that it was correct at one point and possibly had all the parts it needed, but that is no longer the case. I could go out and buy one of those automatic openers and hook it up and it would work as intended, or I could figure out how to work with what I have.
- I’m still going to try to kludgy this together somehow. Maybe flip the vent for the summer and wedge it closed for the winter? Maybe some Rube Goldberg machine can open that vent when the fan turns on? Maybe automatic venting that doesn’t even need a fan?
- Ideally the fan will be unnecessary and I would like to not depend on these automatic thingamajigs. Not because I’m a Luddite or hate technology, but because they fail and are hard to fix and make me angry (and the irrigation system battery died and killed all my squash babies earlier this summer). I figure that people managed at one point without all those things, and I can figure out how to as well. Living part time in Philly does make it more complicated, but that sounds like a challenge…
This is Jugtown 