In this episode of FAQ with AGIQ, we're going to talk about one of the most pervasive myths we've encountered in this industry: Humidity spike at lights off… a sudden amount of water that gets released into the space at lights off.
Episode Transcription:
In this episode of FAQ with AGIQ, we're going to talk about one of the most pervasive myths that we've seen in this industry, and that is a humidity spike in lights off… a sudden amount of water that gets released into the space at lights off. And that is a pure myth. What's happening here, is at the lights off condition, your air conditioners are still running. There's still a cooling demand, and your room rapidly cools off. You probably want it to. Your absolute humidity in that room hasn't changed. So, if you were running a flower room at 75 degrees and 50% relative humidity and you're looking to cool it off to 65 degrees and 50% relative humidity, that 10-degree difference represents 25% relative humidity change.
And so, in rapidly cooling off that room, you're going to see a relative humidity spike until your dehumidifiers catch up with you. Some of the ways that you can mitigate this, the easiest way, is to gradually cool your space and gradually turn off your lights. There's a lot of good reasons to have a sunrise and sunset in one of these rooms, but one of the biggest ones is just having accurate space control and preventing these humidity spikes that can potentially be damaging to your crop. By having that slower transition, you're allowing, you know, over even a 15- or 20-minute period, you're allowing your air conditioners to slowly cool off your room, you're allowing your lights to turn off over that sunset period.
You've got a very controlled transition from your daytime to your nighttime condition, and that controlled transition is going to eliminate or help to eliminate that humidity spike during lights off. What's not happening, though, is your plants aren't suddenly transpiring a whole bunch more into the room. All of the impact on your room relative humidity is what you're doing on the control side.
And because you've got control over it, you can solve it.
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