While most commercial growers in the region were scrambling to hook up generators and get their heating systems fired up on that windy Thursday night, we were pan frying Shiitakes on the woodstove in the Mother Ship for dinner. We have an emergency generator for our home, however we had no need to hook it up to our greenhouses. It is a small generator barely able to power the water pumps which were running over time to keep our basement from becoming a lake. It doesn’t have the capacity to power our home’s heating system; our house soon falling into the upper 30’s. Seeing how the Mother Ship wouldn’t drop much below 50 WITHOUT a fire, it seemed reasonable to consider toasting the fire up a little and moving in. After clearing off a bench near the woodstove and setting up camp for a few days, we were wondering why we even bother living in the house in the first place (or at least I was!).
Although the initial loss of power was a real inconvenience (I was on a ladder in the Mother Ship doing mid-night redesigns to the ceiling of the Mushroom Cave), the lack of power for over 70 hours had little effect on the environment in our 3 greenhouses, most notably the Mother Ship. Electricity is ultimately necessary for gaining the maximum potential from the active and passive heating systems, as well as for venting hot air during the day. Fortunately for the greenhouses, the weather stayed cloudy virtually the entire time the power was down and the air was able to vent passively, never really reaching more than 75 degrees as a daytime high. However, at one point during the daytime, the sun came out for an interval causing the temperatures in the Mother Ship to soar. The main vent fans were thus finally hooked up to the generator for less than 10 minutes to provide necessary ventilation of heat. Total cost of fuel to power back-up generator for the greenhouses during the power outage: less than 15 cents.
-James