I got a greenhouse recently so that I could grow my plants outside and provide them with more light, better temperatures, lower humidity, and safety from a very curious cat.
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| The cat in question, doing her best to look like she hadn't just sat on a conophytum. |
The greenhouse has been set up a while, but I've procrastinated on writing this post, mainly because of how much of a saga it was to get my hands on the damn thing.
Back in May, I ordered a Harvst S16 from an online store in Germany thinking it'd ship domestically, but it turned out to be drop-shipped straight from the manufacturer in the UK. I wasn't happy about that to say the least, largely because there was no warning that that would happen, but the shop owner was apologetic and did his best to deal with UPS on my behalf. Unfortunately, German customs took offense to some paperwork mistakes and the shipment basically got trapped in limbo forever.
So I gave up on trying to import it in July, and I managed to find an EU-based store that had it in stock and could ship to Germany. A week later, I had it mostly set up. Mostly.
Assembly
Boy, was this thing heavy! It arrived in three boxes weighing around 50-60 kg total. Everything was flat-packed and mostly straightforward to assemble, though it did take me around 6 hours to assemble on my own.
Unfortunately, I was missing heater cables and a fan unit, and I got 6 left side shelf brackets instead of 3 left and 3 right. Harvst support was very quick to respond to my queries though, and they made it right -- shipped all the replacement parts to me at their cost and made sure the package wouldn't get trapped in customs hell again. They also threw in some acrylic vent covers which were added to their design after my unit was produced.
Some minor gripes with the assembly instructions and documentation, while I'll note here in case it helps anyone in the future:
- Small pieces like the zip tie holders get installed way later than they need to be, which meant that I had to hug the entire back wall of the greenhouse with my short little arms to try and bolt them down. The zip tie holders should be installed on their panel before the panel is inserted into the support beams.
- Likewise, the support brackets don't get installed until the very end. Which means I had to lift up the entire fully assembled greenhouse which weighs more than I do to install them. Not cool. These brackets, in hindsight, could have been slid onto the vertical supports as soon as those supports were added and lightly bolted down out of the way.
- Instructions didn't mention to plug the pump in, but at least that's fairly self explanatory.
- Instructions didn't mention to plug in the lights and with 12 LED grow lights on three shelves that need to be attached to a branching power supply, a wiring diagram would have been really helpful. I ended up just winging it and I kind of regret it because my wiring scheme made turning off lights on certain shelves (by unplugging them) way harder than it needed to be.
- Instructions mention zip tying the aluminum shelves to the brackets but the new bracket design doesn't have holes for this purpose. The shelves stay in place just fine without it, but it was a bit of a confusing moment.
- Likewise, the instructions also talk about fitting heater cables into nonexistent notches on the shelf brackets. Apparently the cables are now to be woven into the shelves themselves.
- If you don't want to use the pump, you need to set the watering schedule to 0 minutes every 0 hours or else the system will complain of a pump fault (setting 0 and a nonzero value isn't enough).
Note: I removed the pump when I was done because I don't think my xeric plants need automatic watering, and poking at them is part of the joy of plants for me, anyway.
All done!
When all was said and done though, I was quite pleased with the result.
On July 20, I had everything minus the missing parts installed and moved my tiny collection in.
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| The plants in their new home. |
After I got back from vacation, I was able to install the missing parts and get the electronics up and running on August 2. I put the system on a guest network to isolate it from the rest of my home internet.
It's been running well and behaving as expected, though there's some UI jank. And sadly, trying to view logs crashes the whole thing and causes it to reboot, but Harvst support has told me that this will be fixed in the next firmware update.
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| Greenhouse temperatures over the last week |
Overall impressions
Build Quality: 4/5
Everything was high-quality and as advertised...except the Pozidriv screws?! These screws were made of really soft metal and began to cam out under the force of a manual screwdriver, thus defeating the entire purpose of Posidriv. I'll probably replace these if I ever need to disassemble and reassemble the greenhouse. The loss of a star is for the missing parts in the box and for the crappy screws.
Ease of Assembly: 3/5
See my complaints about the instructions, above. I will admit that things would have been faster if I had asked my partner for help assembling it, but I'm stubborn like that.
Software: 4/5
It does exactly what is advertised and the automatic functions work. There's some UI jank and the logs thing would normally merit me taking an additional star off because I despise when basic functionality causes an outright crash, but I really appreciate the fact that this thing is designed to function even without a network connection and isn't filled with unnecessary bloat, so I'll leave it at 4 stars. Would be nice if in the future the fan speed could be controlled because I'd rather run them constantly at low RPM than have them going full blast for 5 minutes every hour.
Support: 5/5
Very fast responses to all of my inquiries and they made things right.
Value for Money: 4/5
I personally found it to be good value because the form factor and features (except the automatic watering) were exactly what I wanted in a small greenhouse. If I were more experienced or had more space, I probably would have gone with a custom build using my own lights and sensors but I found not having to worry about the design to be really nice for my first greenhouse.
Overall: 4.5/5
Plants happy, I'm happy. Would again, despite the setup pains.
