Ceres Boulder Greenhouse Tours | Tropical Greenhouse at Golden Hoof Farms
Welcome to our "Boulder Greenhouse Tours video series", where we take you on virtual tours of greenhouses we have designed or consulted on in our hometown of Boulder, Colorado.
First greenhouse on our stop is the tropical greenhouse at Golden Hoof Farms. This passive solar greenhouse is a part of a larger slow food model that the farm embodies in order to operate sustainably and bring people back to their connection with nature and food.
Golden Hoof is a private farm so please email [email protected] if you would like to tour the greenhouse.
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Hi my name is lauren and i do architectural design at Ceres Greenhouse Solutions and you are standing here with me today in one of our greenhouses in Boulder Colorado. This greenhouse sits in a farm called Golden Hoof Farms and so the idea behind this farm is that it's a soulful slow food farm that really brings people back to nature and their connection with food so this greenhouse is a tropical greenhouse and it's designed to mimic the tropical rainforest so how they do this is by using a combination of passive design principles and mechanical climate control systems to diversify our local food economies here in boulder and provide food to our community so we're excited to have you here with us today and come join us
hello welcome my name is Ariana i am a member of the residential design team here at Ceres and today i'm going to talk to you about passive solar design so when it comes to orientation which is a question we get asked a lot 90% of your sun exposure is going to come from the south side so to maximize that sun exposure we typically have some sort of glazing or light transmitting material along the south wall and then we place insulation along the north wall and the insulation acts as something to absorb that heat that is brought in from the south side and then when it gets cold at night it can release some of that heat back into the greenhouse and it's this this cycle of sun harvesting another aspect to orientation is prevailing winds so being here in boulder colorado a mountain town we do get that wind that rolls off the mountains from the west and to maximize that we want to place intake louvers along the west side of the greenhouse and then exhaust fans along the east so that we can push that hot air out of the greenhouse the same way that we want to harvest sun from the south to the north we want to harvest the wind from the west to the east so we're using all these passive principles
so when we think about growing tropicals in boulder colorado one really important element of this design was thinking about how we could do that sustainably so because we get so much sunlight in boulder there are two types of solar implemented in this greenhouse the first is a set of solar panels that are essentially used to power all the mechanical systems within the greenhouse and the second set of solar pv is a solar pv drain back system so what it essentially does is circulates water into the soil that water is heated and keeps the soil temperature between 60 and 75 degrees which is amazing when you're growing tropical plants it also helps to release some of that humidity into the greenhouse so we can keep this humid tropical temperature here
since this greenhouse was designed to mimic nature the client here likes to grow into the soil and a lot of times we get asked can i grow in directly into the soil and still incorporate our GAHT® system which is our ground to air heat transfer system and the answer is yes so the best way to properly incorporate in-ground growing in our GAHT® system is to be mindful of what you are planning to grow in the root zones of those plants but also working with our design team to help come up with a strategy so that we can maximize plant growth while also maximizing the efficiency of the GAHT® system so as we mentioned before one of the key principles to passive solar design is harvesting as much sunlight as possible and one way we do that is through materiality so in this greenhouse this greenhouse is designed with ETFE this is one of our first prototypes which we're testing the material with and one of the major benefits of ETFE is that it allows for more light transmittance so it allows uva and uvb light into the greenhouse which promotes healthy plant growth and also prevents from disease so we hope to use this in our greenhouses in the future but we're excited to start here at Golden Hoof
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