Hi All, I am a third year electronic engineering student at Portsmouth Uni. I have chosen as my final year project to design an indoor greenhouse. The idea is to allow people with little or no garden to grow their own plants/veg. The greenhouse will contain a solar powered environmental control system to measure light and moisture levels and depending on levels provide light and moisture. I believe that because the greenhouse will be indoors i do not need to worry about temperature control as room temperature should be suffcient. I would greatly appreciate feedback form anyone who thinks this is a good or bad idea and if there is anything i should look at specifically. Links to information regarding required moisture levels and light would be hugely helpful. I have already done a fair bit of research but any input is good. Many Thanks
If you were in Canada you would find that (a) since we almost all have central forced-air heating, the relative humidity would seldom exceed 40%, so the plants would need very frequent watering, I start seedlings in my basement (central heating), and am now growing plants in my garage-turned into-a-greenhouse (small electric heater); the former need daily watering whereas the latter are happy with watering every few weeks (b) you really need a lot of lighting.
Thanks very much soccerdad I hadn't thought about different types of heating. Here in Blighty it's radiators or blankets. The unit itself will be around 1m x 0.5m. I thought a reflective inner ceiling would help to achieve more light efiiciency. The watering would be automatic using a soil moisture sensor so that i you were away for a week the plants would be fine. The lighting would be based on the amount of natural light recorded for the day and then topped up with artificial light.
Here "greenhouse" refers to a glass- or plastic-walled structure large enough to walk into and at least say 2 m x 3m - usually bigger - in cross section. By definition, one of those couldn't be indoors, so I assumed that you were planning on designing a room that size. with lighting etc designed to replicate actual greenhouse conditions. Just shows that we may seem to speak a common language but sometimes we don't --- which is why my daughters play soccer and my son plays football
