Outdoor Winter outdoor in Southern California

[Pharmacy]

I am popping some super autos by Stitch, outdoor, durring winter. The winters here are not very cold, but the length of daylight does change. This will be a good test to see how they preform under a winter light schedule.

 

[Pharmacy]

The sun is pretty strong, year round, excited to see the results!

 

[Stitch]

lets see what we can reach

 

[Pharmacy]

Sorry for the delay, everyone! This is coming soon

 

[arboles]

I've gotta SoCal candle foot chart on my old laptop hard drive. I remember being impressed by the amount & quality of light during the winter time there. It would be possible to run a 50k sq ft greenhouse with little supplemental lighting. There's several low cost methods of either storing heat, or using another super cheap heating method that's not very common. I don't understand why the big time warehouse growers haven't figured it out and why they aren't using the techniques to explode their profit margins, & surely LEO isn't looking to hard either during the winter months.

 

[Pharmacy]

You have a point. The winters here are rarely cold. The coldest night time lows are probably in about mid 40's.

 

[Pharmacy]

Sorry.

*aren't really cold

 

[arboles]

From the numbers on that chart, it looks like a lot of free winter lighting; pull the shades & run the supplemental lights & you have a couple grams per watt a month. Ecuador sits directly on the Equator, & it would be a lovely place to winter, maybe a few other places too.

 

[Pharmacy]

That's a very good idea! I didn't even think about that.

Waiting on stitch to send the seeds and after that I will start the experiment.

 

[arboles]

If you have the space, you can get a couple of 55 gallon drums, paint them black, get a pump and rig up a system to allow the water to flow from one barrel to the other using pvc pipe painted black. The barrels will act as heaters during the night, discharging their stored heat acquired from the day's sunlight that heating everything black. The pump can be run on a couple of deep cycle batteries & a solar panel, or two. Most people run their piping above, facing south so it gets sun all day. Digging your floor down three or four feet will also help keep things warmer at night. There's a lot of tricks when you live in such a hospitable climate. Solar panel kits can be bought on eBay & assembled for a fraction of retail cost. I found a Chinese supplier of vacuum bags for making commercial quality panels; the material used to encapsulate cells is cheaper in rolls than a liquid polymer resin. Panels can be assembled, placed in the vacuum bag, heated in a homemade over while pulling vacuum, then voila, a panel that'll last 20+ years. It'd be less expensive if you got a group of DIY people that want to make solar power for a fraction of retail. In these unstable times, I imagine women soldering cells instead of knitting in a rocking chair.