Grow Room Automation 101
Growing indoors and combining nature and technology is not a new practice, but it’s one that has been advancing rapidly and gaining more and more interest from growers worldwide. As grow room automation technology improves and becomes one of the fastest-growing sectors in the industry, more people are embracing automation and taking their gardens to the next level.
Why Automate Your Grow Room?
If you’ve contemplated automating your grow room but still aren’t convinced why you should do it, this next part is for you.
Let’s take a look at some of the main benefits of grow room automation.
Spend Less Time in Your Grow Room
In general, automating your grow room helps you do more with less effort, freeing up your time for other activities. You won’t need to put as much labor into your project, and you’ll gain valuable time that you can dedicate to other aspects of your life.
By automating your grow room, you’ll have fewer distractions on a day-to-day basis, since you won’t need to concentrate on your plants as much, as you would if you were doing everything yourself. Having fewer things to micromanage frees up your time and takes a lot of the burden off your chest.
Get Better Yields
Sometimes, you might not respond as fast to your plants’ needs as a grower as grow room automation systems can. From regulating the light cycle perfectly to controlling the temperature and various environmental conditions, the accuracy and regularity of automated systems simply can’t be compared to that of humans.
Since automated grow systems continuously monitor the conditions and environment in the grow room, they’re able to make small adjustments and achieve the desired conditions quickly, so that your plants stay unaffected by any changes that might have occurred.
This allows your plants to thrive, improve their grow rates, and ultimately, produce the best yields possible.
Take your Cultivation to the Next Level
If you’re not an experienced grower, or even if you’ve never grown a thing in your life, you shouldn’t get discouraged thinking you won’t be able to do so, especially when you can turn to technology and have a fully automated grow room that will bring you great results and even better yields.
However, it’s not just new growers who can benefit from automating their grow rooms. Experienced growers can also take advantage of the technology that’s available to them and take their cultivation process to the next level. They can automate portions of their operations or have full grow room control by automating nearly the entire growing process, ensuring quality yields while saving time and money in the process.
DIY Automated Grow – How to Automate Your Grow Room
Now that we’ve covered some of the main benefits of automating your grow room, let’s take a look at the grow room automation process step-by-step, so that you can easily automate your grow room on your own even if you don’t have any knowledge or experience in this area.
Automated Watering
Setting up a DIY automatic watering system isn’t as hard as it might seem, but it does require some initial work. You can easily find all the supplies you need online and have them delivered to your door. While experienced growers will tell you that spending a bit of extra time setting up your DIY watering system is worth your time and can save you some money along the way, if you want to start growing right away, we recommend buying a full kit that you can easily assemble at home instead of purchasing each part or element separately.
Some of the best kits you can find online include the Raindrip R560DP Automatic Watering Kit, Scotts All-in-One Precision Drip Kit, and Flantor Garden Irrigation System. All of these irrigation systems work great for growing indoor cannabis. Before purchasing, make sure to check how many plants they can cover, and whether or not they come with a timer or if this needs to be purchased separately.
Automated Temperature
If you want your automated grow room to be set up properly so you can produce high-quality cannabis, you need to understand that temperature control plays a very important part in the whole process.
Monitoring the temperature in your grow room is essential, which is why you shouldn’t hesitate to invest in a high-quality temperature controller, so you can keep your plants healthy and ward off pests and diseases. Cannabis plants thrive at a similar temperature to what we humans like. They prefer to be kept in areas with a temperature range of 70-85 °F (20-30 °C) during the day and at slightly cooler temperatures at night.
To manage your grow room’s temperature automatically, you should invest in a temperature controller that offers convenience, comfort, easy set-up. The BN-LINK Digital Cooling Thermostat and Inkbird ITC-308 Digital Temperature Controller offer just that.
Automated Humidity
A big part of the grow room automation process is setting up an automatic humidity control system so you can manage your cannabis plants more efficiently. If you want to grow high-potency, sticky, and dense buds, you can’t overlook your plants’ humidity needs.
Keeping your grow room humidity levels in check can help prevent mold from developing and nutrient problems and help your plants grow to their fullest potential. Your plants will require different levels of humidity during different cycles of their growth, which is why having this process fully automated will help provide your plants with the right amount of humidity at the right stages of their growth.
There are a lot of humidity controllers you can choose from, some of which act as both humidity and temperature controllers, allowing you to cover both processes at once. The Inkbird Temperature and Humidity Controller ITC-608T and DIGITEN DHTC-1011 are both multifunctional humidity and temperature controllers that work well for grow rooms of any size.
Automated Ventilation
No automated grow system is complete without proper ventilation. Whether you’re using a grow tent or a grow room, an important part of the process that will help you get the most out of your plants is keeping a stable environment via proper ventilation. Providing your plants with extra airflow using automated ventilation will help to keep them from developing illnesses, and it keeps the humidity levels in check as well.
No matter what type of ventilation system you decide to go with, its functions will remain the same. Those include providing uniform humidity and temperature levels and supplying your plants with enough CO2 for photosynthesis.
The most common equipment growers use for ventilation are motorized fans. To achieve automated ventilation, simply connect your fans to a fan-speed controller that will be able to control the power of your fans, and set ventilation intervals so that you can exchange air every 3-5 minutes, keeping your grow room conditions optimal. The Cdmall Electronic Fan Speed Controller works great with different types of fans and is up to the task of automating your grow room ventilation.
Automated CO2
While fans play a big part in CO2 control by distributing it evenly throughout your grow room or tent, setting up an automated CO2 system to introduce CO2 into your grow space in set intervals can help you increase your yields by providing your plants with plenty of CO2.
There are a number of ways you can construct a CO2 system, but the most commonly used method by home growers is using a CO2 tank with a regulator kit. CO2 tanks are filled with compressed CO2. They can be connected to a regulator, which allows you to manually control the flow of CO2.
If you want to make this process fully automated, you can hook the regulator to a CO2 controller so you can automatically monitor, record, and control the CO2 levels in your grow room, keeping the conditions ideal so your plants can thrive.
Automated Feeding
The process of integrating an automated feeding system into your automated irrigator is known as fertigation, and it streamlines every aspect of the feeding, from mixing water-soluble nutrients into the irrigation system to scheduling the feedings properly. This system is typically used for large-scale cannabis grow operations, as it can be quite expensive to set up.
For those of you who’d like to set up an automated feeding system in your grow room, the cheapest solution is to go the DIY route and use a tank connected to a distribution pump so you can feed nutrients to your plants through a dripper pen. This system should work out fine for small grow room operations and is inexpensive to set up.
Multi-Function Controllers
If you feel that having separate controllers for the temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, and everything else you need to monitor is a bit of a hassle (and may make your grow room a bit messy and disorganized), you can opt for a multi-function grow room controller so you can check and monitor everything on a single device. Some of these can control every aspect of your grow room, while others cover only the basics such as humidity, temperature, and CO2 levels. The controller you choose depends mainly on the extent to which you’d like to automate your grow room. The Hydro2Go iPonic 614 Grow Room Environment Controller is a great solution for those who want to monitor the environment of your grow room from one place, sparing you from having to get numerous different devices for each aspect of your garden.
Automated Grow Boxes and Tents
Sometimes, all you need is an all-in-one solution, especially if you feel like you’re getting an information overload or find the work associated with creating your own automated grow room a bit too time-consuming and exhausting. If that’s the case, there are many options out there specifically tailored for growers like yourself.
These options include automated grow tents and fully automated grow boxes, both of which have their own advantages when it comes to cannabis cultivation.
Grobo and Seedo are two of the most popular automated grow boxes available on the market that offer growers the freedom to grow their own herb in the comfort of their home – without having to put in any effort into the growing process.
Automated tents, on the other hand, are much less expensive than automated grow boxes, and while they require some input from you as a grower (unlike fully automated grow boxes), they simplify the growing process, as it’s easier to control the environment inside a grow tent than it is in a grow room. They also offer much more space than automated grow boxes do, so you can grow more plants at the same time.
Wrapping Up on Automated Grow Systems
As you can see, there are a ton of options out there so that growers of all experience levels can successfully grow their own herb. From skilled professionals to growing enthusiasts with no previous cultivation experience, everyone can successfully grow cannabis in the comfort of their own home if they follow the right steps and put in the time and effort to achieve the right growing conditions.
Having everything automized can make the whole process a lot easier, and it can also help you get the most out of your plants with the least amount of effort – definitely something worth considering.
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