What are Tip Taped Triangles?

Growing Spaces started out making 15', 22' and 33' Growing Domes^® in order to optimize the cutting of the glazing panels from a 4' or 6' wide sheet of polycarbonate with little or no waste. However, for years people were asking us to make domes that were in between the 15' and the 22' or the 22' and the 33' sizes. In order to satisfy our customers and the demand, we created the 18' and 26' Dome sizes, which are now our most popular sizes. The downside of these two sizes is that we were faced with a choice of cutting the triangles from a 6' sheet and thus creating a lot of waste, or cutting the triangles from a 4' wide sheet and adding on a triangular tip. We ended up choosing the latter option as it enabled us to produce a Dome that was more affordable to the customer, and saved a large amount of scrap glazing from going to the landfill, optimizing resource use. The tip is taped on with a high quality aircraft tape and is structurally sound as the tip is also screwed to the Dome structure along with the glazing panel.

Overall we feel this is the best solution for minimizing our impact to the environment while also keeping the Growing Dome as affordable as possible. Because we couldn't optimize the 18' or 26' glazing, we decided to optimize the lumber cutting and make that with zero waste. We did this by cutting the B and C struts of the 26' dome out of a 10' piece of lumber with no waste. The wall plates are also zero waste because they come out of a 16' piece of lumber. The wall panels come out of a 4' x 8' sheet so the wall height is either 16" or 24", avoiding waste on the width of the panel.

Our warranty stands on all of the growing domes we build and, whether tip taped or not, all polycarbonate glazing triangles and wood struts are warranted for up to 10 years. We hope that you will share in our passion for the environment, and minimizing what we put in our landfills.