Attached greenhouses are literally attached to your home, garage or to a shed. There are many advantages to having an attached greenhouse such as the sharing of the heat and electricity from the house or the garage, but also in your ability to get to the greenhouse anytime of the day or night without having to walk out in the cold, although there are exceptions to this. There are some attached greenhouses that simply use the wall of the garage or house as a wall for the greenhouse but you still must go outside to get into the greenhouse. Let’s talk a little bit about the environment in the attached greenhouse and how you can control it.
The attached greenhouse uses a wall from another building. This wall will cut down on the amount of heat lost to the outside environment from the greenhouse because you will also be absorbing heat from this wall into the attached greenhouse. You will find that with an attached greenhouse your roof panels, or the amount of the actual roof that you have will be less in square footage than that of the freestanding greenhouse so you should not have as much of a heat loss in the winter months due to heat going up to the roof peak area. The difficulty with an attached greenhouse is that because you are located so close to another structure, you may not get the sunlight needed to grow particular plants or flowers but this can easily be solved with by adding a few grow lights to your greenhouse.
No matter what type of greenhouse you are using during the winter months you should make it a point to move all of your shelving in an inch or two. Nothing should touch the walls of the greenhouse during the winter months as many types of materials will conduct cold air and the bring the cold chill in to the greenhouse environment.