92 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



it seems to be a necessity i,o be able lO understand steam heating be- 

 cause thereupon depends part of the success of growing flowers, as there 

 are only three months of the year in which we need no steam heat. 



My first experience in heating greenhouses extends back some twenty- 

 five or thirty years ago, when the florist business was in its infancy, when 

 most of us were short of money and had to get along as cheap as pos- 

 sible. In those days as you will well remember, we used brick flues 

 extending from one end of the greenhouse to the other, with a fireplace 

 in the lower end and some kind of a chimney in the other. These flues 

 kept the house fairly warm and everything seemed to thrive as long as 

 these flues did not crack and let the gas into the houses, which they of- 

 ten did. 



The next improvement we had was putting water pipes with heating 

 coils placed into these fireplaces in addition to the flues which worked 

 fairly well when put in right. After that came the hot water boiler, 

 which of course, is a good thing for the growing of store plants and other 

 plants, but to grow roses it is not as good on account of the sudden 

 changes in our climate, it not being able to heat as quick as steam. 



We therefore had to install the steam boiler with the gravity system 

 by digging a deep hole in the ground in order to place the top water line 

 of the boiler about two feet below the heating pipes to get the condensed 

 water to return to the boiler. This has now been improved upon by the 

 use of steam traps which lift the water into the boilers by their own 

 pressure even if the boiler stands on the top of the ground and above 

 the heating pipes. 



The size of the boiler ought to be about one hundred horsepower to 

 every twenty-five thousand square feet of glass or two boilers of one 

 hundred horsepower each to fifty thousand feet of glass. I would use 

 regular tubular iron boilers with four-inch flues with the smokestack in 

 the front. A seventy-five foot stack with thirty-inch diameter, to a hun- 

 dred horsepower boiler, or if for two or three boilers the stack must be 

 in proportion. There is a great saving in fuel if you have a high smoke- 

 stack, you get more heat out of your coal from a seventy-five foot stack 

 than you get out of a fifty-foot stack. 



The grate ought to be a close shaker grate, about half an inch open- 

 ing, although of course it would depend some on the kind of coal you 

 are using. The main feed pipes out from the boiler ought to be a four- 

 inch to the hundred horsepower, and the return three-inch. The main 

 feed ought to be extended overhead with an asbestos covering to the 

 upper end of the house or from the middle to each end; this pipe can be 

 reduced to a little smaller at each branch from the four-inch, thus making 

 the steam return back to the starting point, the size of the heating pipes. 

 I would use inch and a quarter black pipe about ten lengths to every 

 twenty feet width of pipes, laying under each bench with a little slope to 

 the boiler for carnations. For some other plants you will not need so 

 many pipes. 



There are two systems of heating: High and low pressure. On the 



