In this episode of FAQ with AGIQ, we're going to talk about some of the ways that you can protect your investment, the investment in your building, in your crop, from failures.
Episode Transcription:
In today's FAQ with AGIQ, we're going to talk about some of the ways that you can protect your investment, the investment in your building, in your crop, from failures and having fault tolerance as a mindset in this industry is really important. We've talked previously about things like having canopy sensors that average to accurately control your space, and that's absolutely worth doing.
But you need to ensure that if one of those canopy sensors fails or if your building automation averaging system fails, that you've got something to back up to. Whether that's a returner sensor with an automatic fail over… whatever you've got there, you've got some form of safety. Similarly, your building automation system, the basics need to be in place.
You're building automation server needs to be on an uninterruptible power supply or on generator power, or ideally both, so that in the event of a power blip in your facility or dirty power or whatever, building automation system doesn't go down. It's again one of those key control and monitoring components that has to stay up and running.
In the event that something does go down, you lose power for an extended period of time or whatever, when those rooms turn back on, you need to be in that room within 10 minutes of power coming back on. You need to get back in there really quickly, make sure that all of your systems came alive in the way that you're expecting them to and that your room is operating the way you're expecting it to. And so, a lot of the protection available to you is in managing your facility and standard operating procedures that are smart, that make sense.
It can be difficult to do, particularly if some of these failures happen during the nighttime, during the lights off timeframe where you may not have as many people in the building. The fortunate part about that is, generally speaking, the risk is much lower. You won't have lights on the risk of burning a crop or something like that is much lower.
But you want to make sure that, again, you're protecting yourself against everything that you can conceivably think of, that might be a problem. Local grid failure, power blips, bad power… Do whatever you can to help out your facility be successful. So run a sunrise, sunset, stagger your rooms, ensure that even when I talk about after a room turns on in the morning, having somebody in there in a relatively quick timeframe staggering your room means that one person can do that, that you don't need ten people to hit all ten of your rooms at the same time, or that you don't have one person doing it and is only able to get to the 10th room an hour after things have turned on.
There's a lot of little things about running a facility that again, these are common sense approaches they can get lost in in the whirlwind. But good procedures and good safeties matter a lot when it comes to running a successful facility and ensuring that your facility is tolerant of the failures that are going to happen.
The reality is the building is a system. That system has a lot of moving parts. Some of those parts are going to fail sometimes and you're going to learn about those failures in real time, whether you want to or not. So, think about them ahead of time because it is coming and you can absolutely overcome them if you think about them ahead of time.
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