Grower Benefits
A climate battery comes with significant improvements to conventional greenhouses,
enabling you to save money, time, and energy!
Inexpensive Season Extension
$0.32 per hour
+3 months to your growing season
Running a climate battery amounts to $0.32 per hour for a typical Atmos 30x96 design. That’s just a fraction of the cost to run an equivalent propane heater. With that, you get a very inexpensive means of extending the growing season.
A high tunnel itself adds perhaps a month to the growing season, but offers only passive heating. A climate battery allows you to make full use of the shoulder seasons where the sun may be strong but the cold night temperatures would otherwise prohibit growing.
Increased Growing Zones
+2 Growing Zones
At Threefold Farm, home of our original climate batteries, we can turn our zone 6b climate into an 8b, often close to a zone 9 climate. This transforms our Mid-Atlantic climate into something more like a gulf coast climate.
This allows us to easily grow most greens without row cover through the winter or to grow subtropical plants all year round.
For example, in our south-central Pennsylvania climate, we often don’t experience a freeze in our climate battery greenhouses until late December, then not another freeze after the beginning of March.
Soil
Pre-Warming
Increased Root Zone Temperature
Climate batteries pump and store heat in the soil beneath a greenhouse. As a result, your plants have access to this heat early to begin growing with vigor, much like greenhouse systems that use soil warming pipes.
Root zone temperature is a major factor in getting many plants started and growing early in the season, and the climate battery enables just that.
As an example, the soil temperatures in our climate battery greenhouses in south central Pennsylvania are in the low 60’s by mid March and 70 by the end of April. We maintain those 60-70 degree soil temperatures often into mid-November.
Reduced Labor
Decreased Labor & Reduced Heating Cost
Two of the largest costs for any small farming operation are labor and greenhouse heating (for those fortunate enough to have a heated house).
A significant source of labor for winter production, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, are the row covers necessary to maintain production of winter crops.
However, with low-cost heating provided by a climate battery, you not only speed up the growth of your crops, but also reduce or even eliminate the need for time-consuming and costly row covers. No more uncovering your crops during the day then covering them back up at night. How much expense would that save your farm?
Explore More
Grower Testimonials
