One of these may be a thousand pounds, I wouldn't be sure, but surely a draft horse, or the fellow pulling it, can move it one foot in a very small fraction of a minute...
* Edit *
Forgot to add.
It requires studies to preview an event that would happen only once every 500 years, unless you have a handy reminder... In downtown there is a marker that supposedly shows the maximum level of the 1629 flood in Mexico City before the opening of the Nochistongo Cut, the first opening of Mexico Lake Bowl to the Panuco river basin. Given that we have spare height above sea level, later drainage works involved deep tubing and/or pumping out the excess water, with mixed results so far.
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I think the Army Corps of Engineers used a 100 year flood plan for the current New Orleans levee system. The calculations were indeed based on historical events, but in modern times the trends of the past are becoming obsolete. Global warming, for example, is accelerating certain conditions and thus changing the statistical probability of drastic weather events occurring. Planning for 500 year events apparently is more expensive and less reliable than planning for 100 year events, and in the case of New Orleans they stuck with the 100 year tables which came in at around $15 billion. However, some of the variables involved were stretched to their limits which is why the levees sustained the worst hurricane in New Orleans' history.
Hmm. A human is around 1.2 hp, unless they are well trained, like an athlete, who can sometimes achieve 2.5 hp.
I think the way they do the calculation is a little strange if you look at it this way.
1 hp is the ability to lift 550 pounds per second.
550 times 60 seconds to equal 1 minute of work is 33,000 pounds per minute.
Are they taking into consideration the gearing to slow down the rate of ascent of 33,000 pounds so that it takes exactly one minute to lift it 1 foot?
A horse can easily lift 550 pounds, and from the time the rope looses slack and snaps the weight up, is one second.
This does not mean that same horse could lift 33,000 pounds, and do it slowly so that it takes them one minute.
Another formula for horsepower is, Torque x RPM / 5,252.
But figuring out Torque can be as hard as figuring out what horsepower really is, hi hi.
There is no question about what horsepower is. It's the rate at which work is done. How much work and under what conditions is what the physics formula is all about. The thing to keep in mind is the term "force." It takes effort and work to move anything, but the formula does not stipulate from whence the force originates. It simply points out that if a pound of force is exerted over a distance of one foot for a duration of 1 minute, that's one horsepower worth of work. Those are absolute numbers. The intrinsic power of a horse, of a human, of an automobile engine is all relative to the formula.
1 hp is the ability to lift 550 pounds per second.
That statement is somewhat misleading. 1 hp is the force required to lift 550 pounds in one second. Calculated horsepower makes absolutely no reference to ability, plus there is no requirement that the mass must be lifted; it can be pushed in any direction. The effects of gravity, friction, mechanical advantage of machines, or any other law of physics acting upon the mass does not contribute nor take away from the definition of work performed by one horsepower of effort. That is why moving 333,000 lbs of mass in one minute is equivalent to moving 550 pounds in one second. Force x distance / time is the rule.
You know something, I'm thinking way back to something written on those big old one lung engines with huge flywheels on them.
We still had them old things in things like cement mixers and water pumps.
But one huge one which was no longer used sat on the loading dock.
Now I have no idea what the actual horsepower was of that one lung engine.
But the huge flywheels on the side did have horsepower markings on them at each bearing hole.
Way out near the rim of the flywheel it showed something like 1hp, the next hole closer to the hub showed 3hp, and the next was like 9hp I think, then the holes went by even numbers, 20hp, 30hp, 50hp, and the one closest the hub said like 75hp.
Obviously, when a shaft was connected to the flywheel, the shaft would move much further in distance on the outer edge of the flywheel than near the inner hub where it would barely move 8 to 10 inches.
If one tried to do a job that required 20hp and instead installed the shaft to the 3hp bearing pin, it would probably bog down the engine and make it die.
We used a lot of pumps on our property at one time, and I know less hp could move more water, but not necessarily be able to lift it up to the tower, to do that you had to use a higher hp setting for the shaft that drove the pumps, which were piston pumps by the way.
We also had screw type augers to run grain up to the top of the silos. Many of them had an old one lung motor also with a shaft that ran like looking at the side of a steam locomotive.
Naturally, almost all of that equipment fell into disuse as more modern engines replaced the old one lungers, hi hi.
Sometimes I think you are older than me; a LOT older. LOL Those one lung engines were popular in the 1880's. I had to look that up because I was not sure what the heck you were talking about. Apparently they are internal combustion engines but only fire at a certain rpm. The attached flywheel provided momentum to keep the engine running for a long time without being fired. Once the wheel slowed down the ignition system would kick in and get that flywheel moving at speed again.
I can't imagine what those slots with hp numbers were indicating. The formula shows that hp is proportional to force and distance. I'm guessing the force of the flywheel was equal across its radius, but as you point out the distance traveled increases as the radius increases. Therefore I'd expect more hp at the outer slot than the inner slot.
it would indeed take more hp to lift water than to just push it along in a stream. Lifting involves overcoming the force of gravity. You need so much hp just to do that. Then, as the water rises it's own weight creates resistance to the pump. Even more hp is required to get around that problem. Pushing water is less work because the momentum in the water flow helps move it along, thus less hp is needed to do that.
Oh, those old one lungers were a joy to listen to them run, hi hi.
Whoo, Whoo, Whoo, Pop, Pop, Whoo, Whoo, Whoo, Pop, Pop, hi hi
No, the closer to the hub you placed the shaft, the more horsepower was applied to what it was driving.
Also the shorter the shaft would move forward and back at the far end away from the engine.
You can almost picture it like a pulley system, the smaller the pulley, the more power it has.
One of our first riding lawnmowers, was a Simplicity brand.
As a kid, we would swap the drive pulley with the gearbox pulley, and that lawn mower could then run about 35 mph, hi hi.
But you had to slip the engaging pulley like using a clutch to get it to start moving or it would kill the engine.
If you have a 3 foot diameter flywheel and mount the side shaft on the outer rim pin, that shaft would move about 3 feet at the far end. But if you mounted it near the hub, you may only get six inches of movement at the far end of the shaft.
Although this meant if it was connected to a piston pump, you could pump with a lot more pressure no problem.
But if you put it near the rim of the flywheel, it would cause the engine to die if you tried to push the water upward. Provided you had a piston that long too, which we did for must moving water from the creek up to the pond, a rise of only about 10 feet. Even then it was hard on the engine.
Most of the old equipment on our farm was from the 1870's upward, and grandpa never got rid of anything. If it quit working, it got stored in one of the back barns, and often parts from those items used to make other things.
Nearly all of our flat top wagons, we called whoopies, had Model A frames under them. Some even had wooden spoke wheels, and a few had solid rubber wheels with holes in the sides, all the way through the tire. Some of the wheels were wire wheels, whatever they cobbed from the back barns to build something from.
Grandpa would not sell any old car or truck that he deemed no longer road worthy, he didn't want someone to get hurt and sue him because of it.
In fact, that's how I got the 1946 Ford Deluxe. He parked it because it didn't have any oil pressure, and he considered the motor was ruined. I pulled the oil pan to replace the pump and saw it was just the shaft to the pump that had broken. Replaced it, and we turned the motor by hand just in case the cylinders had rusted up. They hadn't so I got a battery and fired it up. Ran like a top.
Back then they installed the chrome, and there was a lot of it on this car, by drilling holes in the body and used spring clips.
Most of the chrome was bad, so I pulled it all off, dented the holes and filled them with lead, which is what was used before we had body putty, hi hi. After a paint job and redoing the interior of the car, the only place I could drive it was on the property because I didn't have a license yet. Dad got insurance on it, and we used it to go on a couple of fishing trips.
After I got my license, I used it to go to school and for just bumming around a bit. Then, after all that work I did to it, my cousin bought it from my grandmother, who's name was on the title without telling her I was driving it and was who got it from the barn and fixed it up. That irked me to no end. Made my dad mad too, so he gave me his 1955 Ford Custom in its stead.
On another note: That old 1946 Ford almost looked like an oversized VW Bug.
My cousin and a bunch of his friends were going out to KU for a football game.
So they got some other friends with VW Bugs, and using poster paint, they painted all of them, including the Ford, Blue and Yellow. With KU plastered on them of course! And they made the long drive from St. Louis to Kansas City with the Ford in front and 5 or 6 VW bugs trailing behind. Folks took pictures of them going down the highway, and they appeared in a couple of newspapers of the day. We had copies of those newspapers until they turned brown and crumbled.
I'm sure grandpa turned over in his grave knowing that old car he considered unroadworthy was making such long trips, hi hi.
Well, I just don't understand the mechanical advantage behind the one lung engine or the pulley system. hp is the result of force times distance. If you increase the distance, as would happen at the outer rim of the flywheel, the horsepower would increase as well. The pulley leverage is slightly different and hp is divided by time. If the rpm changes with the position of the side shaft, then I can see hp also changing. I'm assuming it all remained constant, or relatively so, with the one lung contraption.
I had a wood chipper up north. It used pulleys to engage the motor to the fly wheel with the shredder blades attached. Getting it all going without killing the engine was a matter of cranking the engine up to the right rpm. It also depended on how fast I would flip the lever to engage the pulley to the drive belt. It was pretty simple once I figured it all out by listening to how fast the engine was running. LOL
Mechanical engineering is apparently a dominant gene in your family. Your grandpa sounds like he was even more creative than you are today. I can also see from whence you acquired your need to save everything that has not disintegrated into dust yet. All that comes in handy particularly when you are a farmer because new equipment or repairs are astronomically expensive. Farmers improvise a lot of repairs on the equipment which their missing limbs and giant scars can testify to.
I have fond memories of cars with chrome fastened onto their bodies. Some of the grill work I've seen on old family cars would qualify for art. Looking back it seems gaudy, but back in the day it was the cat's pajamas.
Not so Yogi! Have you ever driven a stick shift car or truck.
What happens if you try to take off in third or fourth gear?
The engine is the same horsepower, but it is not enough to overcome the higher gear ratio, so you'll either burn up the clutch or stall the engine.
On a car, advertised horsepower is measured on the driven wheel, which is how they claim 350 hp from a 45 hp engine.
On a gasoline engine with a side shaft so you can mount a pulley to the engines crankshaft.
You normally use a small pulley on the engine, and a large pulley on the item it is powering.
How much work the thing it is powering can do is dependent on the amount of horsepower transferred to the item doing the work.
If you swap those pulleys around, the item doing the work will spin faster, but have less horsepower and might not be able to do the work it was intended to do.
Heck, I learned this when I was 12 years old by swapping the two pulleys on dads riding lawn mower.
You had to treat the engagement lever like a clutch to get the mower moving when the pulleys were switched, and if you hit a big hill using the lawn mower as a go cart, the engine could not pull it up the big hill and would die.
Swapping the pulleys back the way they belonged and that mower could climb our steepest banks with ease.
I think I mentioned previously on these forums where grandpa D took an electric car and made major modifications to it.
And after doing so, drove that thing all the way to Jefferson City and back. Unheard of in those days.
He added a huge flywheel and a clutch to the car, plus an extra few batteries.
His logic was simple. It takes more battery power to start a motor from stopped, than to keep it spinning once it is up to speed.
Especially when you have a 2 ton car it has to move forward at the same time.
By removing the weight of the car from the starting of the electric motor, and only adding a 200 pound flywheel, it took less battery power to get the motor and flywheel spinning, then the momentum of the weight of the flywheel could take the initial starting movement of the car without bogging the engine too much by using a clutch.
He also added a couple of other things to help recover loss of battery power when coasting downhill. I'm sure he did this by adding magnets to the flywheel, but don't know for certain what he did there.
Grandpa was big on using magnets and coils for a lot of things.
Even the manually operated ventilators in our greenhouses, he found a way to stop them from closing too fast using the same trick of magnets and coils. Saved from pulling the gearing system down off the ventilators, which was common with people who just spun the handle to close them, and didn't slow it down before they went all the way closed.
My other grandpa G, who was caretaker for the horse farm. He was the type who would bolt a pair of steer horns to the front of his old car, hi hi. He wasn't to fancy about cars as it was, preferred horses, hi hi. But still needed a car to go into town with, and to work. He did use horses and a wagon for some trips into town, but with the number of cars on the road, he settled on taking his car or a truck depending on the purpose in going to town in the first place, hi hi.
My comments about horse power and the one lung engine were based on the idea that the drive shaft of the engine had a flywheel sort of thing mounted on the end of the engine's drive shaft. Thus the power from the motor was directly applied to the shaft with the flywheel on it. That arrangement is what does not make sense when I read bout the hp ratings you cite. But then you surely must understand I've never seen a live one lung engine; only a picture of one. When you start adding gears and pulleys to the drive train all the hp calculations I refer to do not apply. The gears and pulleys are in effect levers that change the load and the drive capabilities to suit a given situation. When I tried to start my old '49 Chevy in third gear, to save shifting of the first two, you are absolutely correct about the load of the car stalling the engine. That is due to the gearing and not due to the hp available on the drive shaft of the engine.
Grandpa D had some wonderful insights. He must have been the kind of guy from which you could learn a whole lot of practical knowledge from. I can understand how a spinning flywheel would store enough energy to get a 3000 pound car moving, but the price you pay for that is whatever it takes to get that flywheel moving. You know, the conservation of matter and ENERGY. You can't create free energy. Maybe the normal car batteries lasted longer, but something had to store the saved battery energy in that flywheel.
There is a row of houses across the street from me. In back of them is the countryside. Most of the homes back there are on at least ten acre lots if not more. Further down the street there is a pond among those country houses. I'm guessing it belongs to one of the residents because there have been occasions when I've seen a couple horses between the road and the pond. I have to admit that I don't get around to traveling a lot here in Missouri, but I have been out in the country farmland several times. I can't think of a time when I've seen horses other than those in my neighborhood. Cows are rare too, but I have seen a few of those. I don't know what they are farming around here, but it doesn't involve a lot of animals.
Look at the side of an old locomotive.
Instead of the steam box driving the wheel, look at it in reverse.
The wheel is the engine, and the steam box is a water pump.
Now in the former, the locomotive, the further out on the wheel the connecting shaft is placed, the more power that wheel will have, but at a reduced travel speed. The closer to the axle, the higher the speed, but the steam box may not have enough to pull that train over a mountain.
Again, reversing the system where the wheel is the driving force and the steam box is now a water pump. Putting the connecting shaft on the outer rim of the wheel would move more water through the pump faster, but at a much lower pressure.
Move that shaft to near the hub and you can pump very high pressures but not so much volume per stroke.
My brother used to fill his own scuba tanks. The piston pump he used to get the tanks about 1/2 full had a large piston. Then he had to switch to a pump with a much smaller diameter piston and shorter stroke to get the tank up to the 2000 or 3000 psi. And of course no oil could get into those tanks or it would kill whoever used them.
Grandpa was not an engineer, but he did use logic for a lot of things.
I think what he was considering is the amount the battery drained when driving from stop sight to stop sign, like in Kirkwood.
I don't think the early electric cars had a transmission, and probably used like a rheostat to control the speed of the motor.
But taking off from a standing start really ate up the available juice in the battery.
You have to remember, an electric motor shuts completely off when you stop.
When you consider the number of electric motors we had on our farm, and most of them required a capacitor to get them spinning when turned on, and knowing the lights dimmed down each time one kicked on for a few seconds.
I assume he thought there has got to be a better way that doesn't take so much juice each time you stop and go again.
Also, looking at all the one lung motors we had with flywheels, when they were idling with no load, yes they were burning fuel, but nowhere near the amount of fuel as when a load was applied to them.
I don't doubt this is what he was thinking about when he came up with the idea of adding a flywheel and a clutch to the car.
In addition to that, most tractors do not have a gas pedal per se. They have a throttle you set to the speed you want to go for the gear you are in. So, by adding a three speed transmission to the car, he had 10 mph, 25 mph, and probably 40 mph with the motor at a fixed speed, but could still use the rheostat to get lower speeds, also at the expense of the batteries running time.
I have no idea how many experiments it took for him to get the car to do what he wanted it to do.
Heck, I probably wasn't born yet when he did all of his mechanical wonders around the place.
What I do know, is the car when new, and in original condition, could only go from his house to the far end of Kirkwood where the market was like three times, and that was pushing it. As the car got older, you possibly might not make it all the way home again.
Yet after all of his modifications, and adding extra batteries up front, he could drive that car all the way to Jefferson City and back again. Albeit the second or third time he did that, he didn't make all the way back before the aging batteries gave out. But he was close enough to home he could call for a truck to come pull him the rest of the way home, hi hi.
I don't doubt there are a lot of families around you with horses.
I understand your explanation of the one lung engine driving a water pump as an analogy to a steam locomotive. I think we both have the same understanding of what is going on too. The confusion I have is about the markings showing lower horsepower at the notches furthest from the drive shaft core. Horsepower by definition is force times distance. There is a greater distance being traversed at the outer edge than there is at the inner core. Thus if the force element remains constant, which I'm beginning to think it does not, the horsepower increases as the distance traveled increases. Obviously I need a better understanding of the forces acting on the flywheel.
One of the more amazing aspects of your Grandpa G story is that there were such things as electric cars in his time. I suppose the technology was there but I didn't realize it was being used in automobiles that early. The internal combustion gasoline engine was invented in Germany in 1876. According to Google the electric motor predates it by being invented in 1834 (to run a printing press in Vermont). I just assumed all automobiles were gasoline engine powered up to a couple years ago.
I got timed out on Firefox and it wouldn't let me back in for the last half hour, so I'm back on Google Chrome.
And here was my response I tried to post.
Although I cannot find anything about it on-line. I do know that my grandmothers electric car was licensed in Illinois and the plate said Electric Vehicle on it. I'm guessing it was 1914, but the car itself could have been older. Like a 1910 maybe? At the time we had some farmland over in Illinois and Missouri did not have a specific license plate for electric cars.
I think the horsepower ratings on the flywheel didn't have anything to do with the motor itself, but how much horsepower was produced at the working end of the shaft. I never studied up on what it meant, just from observation of them around the farm.
Our cement mixer had a fairly small one lung engine on it, and a tiny sprocket on the motor shaft, and a huge sprocket on the cement drum so it turned ever so slowly.
I loved to hear them old things run. Maybe the fun was hearing the uncles cuss a blue streak trying to get one running, hi hi.
I hunted through several for the last half hour before I found one even close to one like one of ours, this one has a pulley on one side, but you can see the bolt holes for the shaft drive pins if you use it that way.
Doesn't sound like ours did though, but works the same way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSKjxhWuRQA
I can't believe I spent another half hour looking at those old hit n miss engines.
Never did find one with the exact sound I was hunting for though.
Did find one like was in our cement mixer, but it was part of a long video.
And here is what I got three or four times when I would hit submit.
The connection has timed out
The server at bfchat.brainformation.com is taking too long to respond.
The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.
If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.
I have to thank you for spending so much time looking for that engine. It's pretty much what I expected it to be, but maybe a lot cleaner. LOL I still don't quite understand how to calculate horsepower on a flywheel, but I am certain the classic formula I've quoted is somehow involved.
That time out message from our server is probably as old as this website. I have in fact talked to the help desk and opened up a couple trouble tickets in the past. Every time I do that the server is working fine and they imply something is wrong on my end. I know that is not the case, plus it's not related to browser performance either. The issue seems to be related to the fact that we are on a shared server. Some of those other people do some CPU intensive tasks and max it out. When the CPU usage is at 100%, then nobody else has access to it and queries time out. They refuse to tell those heavy CPU users to back off because they are not violating any terms of service. Lag and denial of service is the price one pays for sharing with a bunch of other folks. And, the price I am paying is very reasonable. The only option is to go to a dedicated server. I don't know what that would cost, but it doesn't seem urgent given that only two of us use this site on a regular basis. And, just so you know, it timed out for me too around lunch time. I have no idea when it came back online. If it gets really obnoxious, I will open yet another trouble ticket. I have a feeling I'll be talking to the helpdesk anyway because there are phpBB software updates waiting to be installed. Every time I do that I need to get the hosting service people involve. They don't take responsibility for that either.
Last edited by yogi on 11 Sep 2021, 16:03, edited 1 time in total.
You are probably right. I tried using the Try Again link, that didn't work. I tried closing the browser and reopening it, that didn't work either. So I went and did something else, and when I came back on Firefox it still didn't open. So I closed that and opened Google Chrome and got right in. Maybe by then it was back open again and I could have with Firefox too.
We had a one lung engine with dual flywheels to run the sawmill. It had two pulleys on it bolted to the flywheel, a large pulley and a smaller pulley, which is the one used for the sawmill. The large pulley was used to power a planer I think my uncle said.
But most of the ones we did have were used to pump water, and used a shaft like a train has powering its wheels.
The humongous one that sat on our loading dock all the years I was growing up, had two massive flywheels, and I'm pretty sure it was the one that had all the holes for pins in the flywheel.
All of the video's I looked at none of them sounded exactly like ours, but I think that could be because they were running without a load on them.
Although they are 4 stroke engines, instead of a governor that controlled the fuel amount, the governor only turned on or off the spark plug. So they did not fire every other turn of the flywheel unless the load was heavy. It would fire a couple of times to get the speed of the flywheel up, and then wouldn't fire again until the speed of the wheel slowed down a tad.
I guess that is why they now call them hit n miss engines, hi hi.
The next time you get a timeout message try this: https://downdetector.co.uk/
It's a site in the UK that checks to see if it's just you or if the site is down for everybody. There are similar sites in the USA if you care to look them up.
Those "hit and miss" engines must be pretty cheap to operate given that farmers took a liking of them. If I were ambitious I would look into the theory a little deeper to see why the ignition only turns on at a certain rpm. The YouTube video showed that it takes a manual spin of the flywheel to get things going. Apparently he was lining things up before he gave it a spin too. My guess would be he wanted the piston fully out of the cylinder and ready for the power stroke at the first turn of the wheel. That works well for an engine the size of the one in the video. Anything bigger must require superman to start things spinning. LOL
Ah yes, I use downdetector quite often. But I do think their entry system needs a different way of doing it.
If you are down and later when it finally comes back up, you can vote that you were down, but this is always after the fact, so you can't say when you were down.
I had a model B Briggs engine on my Milbradt lawn mower. You had to crank it to get it started. But the trick on it was to hold the exhaust valve open (there was a lever for that) until you got the flywheel spinning and then let the exhaust valve close, and it would fire up.
I've started a few of the smaller one lungers on our property before, and the trick is a little different. You want to use the compression stroke to help you spin the big wheels by hand. From a full bore cylinder you cannot often pull the wheel hard enough to get to the dead center point of compression. So you hold the exhaust valve open until you turn the wheel 1/4 turn, then let it close and pull with all your might until you are top dead center. Take a breath and give that wheel a pull as hard as you can, the compression will help give you a faster spin, and if you are lucky, it will start that time. If not and you can keep the momentum of the wheel spinning, then it might start. If not, you start all over again getting the compression back up and try again, hi hi.
Our huge one lunger on the dock you could not start by hand, unless you were the Hulk, hi hi. It used a smaller pony motor to get it going, and not by belts and pulleys either. You bring the piston up to top dead center first, then move the flywheel just enough it is past dead center and the piston ready for it's down stroke, and lock the flywheel in this position. Then you start the pony motor which compresses air into the cylinder until the pop off valve on the air tank on the pony motor starts hissing. You release the lock on the flywheel and help pull it as fast as you can, and hopefully you can keep it spinning until it starts. Also, if it seems to not want to start, you charge it up again with the pony motor, only this time after it makes a couple of spins you pull the exhaust valve open and use people power to keep the flywheels spinning, and do a couple of test sparks, if it pops, you let the exhaust valve close and hope it keeps running. I've only seen the big one on the dock being run like perhaps three or four time when I was younger, but never once after I was around 11 or 12 years old. But we did use the smaller pumps to run the Skinner lines that watered our fields. The Skinner lines also had huge hydraulic rams that rotated them back and forth like a lawn sprinkler. I'll tell you this, they were a royal pain to set up and even harder to take back down again. Everything was all steel pipes back then.
If you prefer, you can simply ping 216.85.168.253 when you get a connection failure error message. That should tell you something.
I looked at the website you posted for Skinner irrigation systems. It seems as if some of the formatting is missing; maybe a problem with CSS. The links are all plain text and no formatting. Thus it was very difficult to find those arrows you mentioned. I did eventually manage to scroll through the assortment of photos, all of which were quite interesting. I must thank you once again for going through all the trouble to do the research. I am REALLY glad now that I didn't choose farming for a career. It looks way too difficult for the average bear.
You would not believe the stuff one has to know in order to maintain a farm and especially greenhouses.
Like when you install steam pipes under the raised flower benches, if you don't realize that pipe is going to expand around a foot or two for the length of the bench, you could end up in serious trouble with your heating design.
And when you have two 100 foot long steam pipes under each flower bench, you could end up knocking them down with the steam pipes when they are turned on, hi hi.
Greenhouses have to pull fresh air in from outside, which is cold in the winter, to get the CO2 replenished, and let the oxygen rich air out the top, without cooling the greenhouses down, especially where the cold air comes into the greenhouses which could freeze the plants near the intake vents.
And that is just one aspect of the situation.
Rainwater runoff from the glass roofing, and drainage from watering the plants inside all needs to be carefully considered.
Yes Sir, there is one heck of a lot to know and understand, not only about farming, but also about structures, and a big one is daylength for each of the plants you are raising. Which is one reason we have to cover certain plants like mums with black cloth so they will bloom when we need them too.
Yeppers, lot's to it my friend!
