Grow Room Automation

What Can Hydroponics Automation Do For YOU?

From Biksa’s Grow Room (Grozine #13-PreRelease) Grow Room Automation.

This hydro garden runs itself once transplants are set in with Intelligent Reservoir Automation. A harvest can be achieved every two weeks on a rotation.

Q:

Do you recommend going with full automation for indoor growing? We are looking to start up a large scale commercial growing operation, and see this as a great way to help keep costs down for things like labor, ie we don’t need to hire teams of experts and to help ensure we get good yields and respectable crop quality. As a new business venture, a crop loss or poor yield could wipe us out financially.

A:

Historically, indoor and greenhouse growers in commercial, research and home settings have adopted timers, relays, float valves, thermostats, etc for decades now.

In any commercial growing operation you are going to need a level of automation-to what extent will depend on your own level of technological sophistication or the willingness to learn, adapt and adopt what is available, and naturally, how much you can afford to spend. Sky is the limit—seriously, they have Cloud capabilities now—it’s gotten that sophisticated.

A big difference today over just a few years ago is that the technology that is available to growers is leaps and bounds more intelligent and sophisticated than it was before, dollar for dollar. Another significant area of difference is that the devices can now “talk” amongst themselves or offer intelligent data processing rather than just slamming a contactor/relay at an absolute set point.

Here’s an example:

You would have been Johnny HiTech to have automated reservoir EC or pH controls just a few years ago. Let’s say you did. While being a step forward over manual dosing, the dosers would likely have been “blind slaves”. There was no thinking or learning. If the pH is set to 5.7, the system would have jetted buffer into the solution as fast as it could until the set point was adjusted.

But did the doser know your reservoir conditions, for example, would the pH have changed automatically because it would have dosed nutrients into the reservoir in an hour or so anyway, based on a daily pattern that is specific to your grow. The smart system, (and grower) would know the answer to this—and may have waited. Why? Because an excess of buffers alters your nutrient chemistry, and what happens when you overshoot the point from fast action and no thinking? The pH would have been out of whack, and the process repeats, further drifting away from maintaining the perfect solution for your growing investment.

The doser of today thinks. And we’re just talking about reservoir only here—what about things like temperature, lighting, carbon dioxide, aeration for roots, humidity—and what about changing these conditions at different times in a 24 hour cycle to achieve stronger crop responses is a specific phase of development?

Imagine these devices talking amongst themselves, making changes based on patterns specific to your grow and the system programming to maintain what and when. The system can tell you how things are going and allow you to make changes from anywhere in the world.

hydroponic reservoir automation: touch screen control that does intelligent thinking

For most growers, learning the basics with analog or simple digital controls is usually a good place to start if you are going to try things out on a smaller scale first before your blow the wad on big time hydroponic farming.

However, once you have the fundamentals, I suggest applying a scalable intelligent grow control to your existing operation and then learn to manage and realize the full potential of the animation system itself before then scaling up the grow operation itself.

Following these steps may take a little longer, but you aren’t leaving yourself as vulnerable to total financial loss as you will have developed a solid foundation in both growing equipment and applications as you scale up your efforts.

A little time spent developing your market while not carrying a ton of financial risk can pay back in spades.

In the end your growing control system is only as smart as what you ask of it—even though the system may be smarter than you or I nowadays to begin with. Spend the time to know what it is you are going to ask of it for consistent success.

Bagged N Tagged: automatically grown and lovingly harvested by hand.