Tweaking the temperature

Overnight low was 14F.

6:00 Outside 14, Greenhouse Ambient 37.8, Greenhouse Soil 44.6
7:00 Outside 17, Greenhouse Ambient 37.0, Greenhouse Soil 43.0 (Sunrise 6:56)
8:00 Outside 21, electronic 64.8, alcohol 58, Greenhouse Soil 44.6 (sun shines more directly on the electronic thermometer)

The sun hits the greenhouse at sunrise, but only for a couple more weeks. Soon it will be shaded by the neighbor's house until around 10:00.

This morning I am checking the temperature every hour, but I have to wait until around 10 before it is warm enough for me to open the door and check last night's minimum.

Looking through the glass, the romaine, spinach and basil all look fine. About 6 radishes are up, as are about half of the red leaf and green leaf lettuce. I can't see inside the wws to check on the tomatoes.

I need to improve my temperature monitoring set up to avoid a false high temperature reading. The thermometer is exposed to the direct sun during part of the day and this gave me an inaccurately high reading of 102 yesterday when the real temperature inside the greenhouse was closer to 80.

At the moment though, my concern is accurate low temperature readings. I have learned the main thing I needed to know, that I can keep the greenhouse from freezing up when the outside temperature falls as low as 4 overnight. Doing so uses about 14 kWh of electricity.

A couple of things I need to do:

The thermometer needs to be installed in an instrument shelter that shades it from the direct sun. This could just be a shallow box that I could attach to one of the tomato towers with zip ties. Maybe a little birdhouse type box, painted white, about 3 inches deep with an angled shed roof to make it look nice. It needs to be deep enough to shade the instrument in the early morning when the sun shine on the east.

I need to move the weather station as well. I should set up everything so that I can go to one place to get last night's outdoor temperature, it would be nice to have a couple of remote sensors to put in the greenhouse so I could read it's temperature directly from the weather station. Expensive though.

Should I put the thermometer and the circulation fan timer and the Kill-a-watt meter all in a box together so that I can check the temperature, read the power usage and control the fan all from the same place? This would be convenient, but it might also mean a bunch of cords and wires all over the place. I don't want to be tripping over cords and it's bad enough with the heater, fan timer and cords where they are now. I guess the best would be to

Is it necessary or useful to regularly check the power usage? At minimum, I should make up a chart and mark down the power consumption once a day. Presumably once the temperature drops below a certain point, the heater will just run continuously. It might be nice to know what that temperature is. Then I could determine when it was no longer cost effective to try to keep the greenhouse from freezing up.