We purchased our Greenhouses from Zimmermans Welding in Missouri. They offered the heaviest duty kit at the lowest price. I would highly recommend anyone who is building to contact them and see if they will provide what you need. Dan Healy was the contact I spoke with and he was a wealth of information for someone like me who had no idea what I was getting into. These Greenhouses ar 30 x 60 feet and the two of them are end to end with 24 feet between them so its 144 feet from end to the other, its an impressive sight every time I go out there.
A couple of the things we thought we wanted in a greenhouse Dan changed our minds on. For one we were planning on doing roll up sides but after hearing his explanation of the benefits of dropdown it made absolute sense. See with a rollup side when you open on a cool morning that cold air comes in at ground level where your tender young plants are, when its windy the wind is blasting through right at ground level and animal pests have much easier access than with a dropdown where if you open it a foot its four feet off the ground where the air comes in and there is still a wall there presenting a barrier to anything that might come dropping by.
We also thought we wanted closer spacing on the bows but Dan suggested that the six foot spacing with the W truss option would be fine with our lighter snow loads. I was concerned about our high winds but the stiffness of this structure has helped greatly in keeping movement to a minimum which is critical to the life of the plastic film.
Lastly the plastic film. There is two main types of coverings for these structures, Film and Fabric. Film is thinner and without reinforcement but is cheaper and has a higher light transmission. Fabric is heavier and tougher with slightly lower light transmission but much more expensive. After talking with them we decided to go with the film top and endwalls and fabric on the sidewalls. The top covering alone in fabric would have been around $1200 at the time where film was closer to $400 so our reasoning is that we could replace the top 3 times at the same cost. October 2018 will mark 2 full years so far for the top and we are hoping it will serve for another 2 to 4 years.
One and only complaint is the pallet they were shipped on was pretty flimsy. Its was kind of UPS fault for shoving it into a box truck as this should have been loaded on a flatbed by forklift from the side but it is what it is and there was not any damage that worth crying over. It did take My brother and me a couple hours to get it dragged out of the box truck which the UPS worker should have already had done before we got there. Once out it was all quickly loaded and hauled home.
The jobsite photos show where the greenhouses are being built, some of the lumber and other materials I had already picked up and a piece of trailer frame I built a jig on to make all of the bows exactly the same.
This last picture of the bees I tossed in because I thought it was cool. Mostly certain there was a queen under that pile and they figured out that wasn’t a good place for a hive and moved on by the next day and I got my 2×4 back.