Growing seeds without a greenhouse or "heated" propagator?

A few years ago I saw a rather innovative way of getting over the heat issue.

What this person did was built a wooden box with a plastic lid of a size to suit around eight standard trays in his unheated greenhouse.

Then he run an extension lead from the house and fitted two lead lamps to it, he used a tin can rather than a cage to protect the bulb.

The heat emitted from the bulb was sufficient to keep the inside of the box above freezing, and even quite warm on milder nights!

A bit of a warning!!!....Electricity and water do not take kindly to each other so take great care when watering the seeds!

I have seen a variation on this using 'nightlite' candles in a tin can and these too can emit a fair bit of heat.

You could also think of building a box to suit the size of your mini greenhouse and fit a soil cable / mat in it!

So there is a few other ideas for you....Tg

 

Quite right Clueless - I should have said "tends to be" rather than "always are". There are often other factors to take into consideration. Water is a pretty poor conductor compared with a metal, but does quite well as it usually comes in much larger sizes than metal conductors. Aluminium is 10^10 (ie 10 billion) times better at conducting electricity than water. But then water is ten billion times better than some insulators such as rubber or glass.

 

I've done that with a biscuit tin too, but in these days where there are no longer many incandescent light bulbs its more of a challenge as you don't get enough heat from energy saving bulbs.

 

True! .....and not much light either