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You'd think they'd do better at containing the light from the grow houses, so more ends up on the plants and less making it to space. Like, foil or something?
by robbrown451 7y ago
You'd think they'd do better at containing the light from the grow houses, so more ends up on the plants and less making it to space. Like, foil or something?
- teilo 7y agoI mean, people who grow pot figure out how to hid the light, so yeah.
- ct520 7y agoor do they.. Did you see all the light up in northern cali? LOL
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 7y agoSince these are greenhouses they have to be clear to let the light in during the day, I assume. Anything that's going to reflect light to prevent it from leaving at night will also block the sun from hitting the leaves during the day, unless it's a complicated mechanical system that can be folded up during the daytime. I'm guessing such a reliable mechnical system together with maintenance is much more expensive than the light leakage.
- coderintherye 7y agoThere are systems on the market that are not too complicated. We have an iGrow system for instance for our greenhouse. But yes, the covers do tend to snag and such when rolling up and that can be problematic and require maintenance. Definitely though the industry does not seem to have yet embraced automation much.
- Moru 7y agoGreenhouses are early adopters of automation. But they only automate the stuff that actually works reliably. This means watering schedule, fertilizer and light. There are few things mechanical that can go wrong with them, especially the light part. They don't have a hord of maintenance people that have time to fix everything that goes wrong. They might have one person that is doing that beside other things. I live close to one of the bigger ones in north Sweden. They run some accelerated daytime schedule in the darkess of the polar winter so at least part of the nights has a yellow sky in the whole area. You see it for 10 km on the way to the village nighttime. Could almost believe it's a 100 k town but no :-)
- coderintherye 7y agoYes, good to note my perspective is on greenhouses in the US, I think greenhouses in Europe are definitely more automated, especially in Amsterdam!
- throwaway9d0291 7y agoWhat about that electrically controlled darkening glass like they use for windows on some of the newer planes?
- zdragnar 7y agoThat is insanely expensive compared to the more standard poly that gets used, and something as simple as a hail storm night shatter the glass and ruin an entire crop. I imagine some cheap opaque sheet metal, solar panels and 24/7 artificial lighting would be cheaper than mega-greenhouse amounts of specialty glass.
- ficklepickle 7y agoFoil isn't as reflective as one would guess. Mylar or even matte white painted surface are better. It really surprises me, too. I guess the sheer size of these operations make it difficult or impractical. The cost must be greater than that of the wasted light. Too bad, because that is a lot of wasted light.