The Smart Growth Blog

Rooms are a system. Treat them like it.

Written by Geoff Brown | Apr 13, 2023

In this episode of FAQ with AGIQ, we’ll talk about rooms and how you should be treating them like the system they are. 


Episode Transcription:
In this episode of FAQ with AGIQ, we’ll talk about rooms and how you should be treating them like the system they are. I understand that it's somewhat difficult at the outset to do this. You've got a bunch of different people who are trying to sell you different parts of your room. Your fertigation, your bench, your lights, your HVAC, your dehumidification - all of that potentially is coming from different people.

Some of it's going to be engineered, some of it's going to be designed, some of it's going to be your local distributor. The biggest challenge with that, though, is all of those individual parts make up a closed system, your room that your individual flower room or bedroom or mom room is a closed system, and everything in that system impacts everything else in it.

Your HVAC impacts your plants in your fertigation, your lighting impacts your plants and your HVAC. All of this stuff matters and it needs to be controlled and designed in a way that everything complements each other. You don't want to suddenly swap lighting types after you've sized your HVAC, for instance. I know it sounds obvious, but again, we see it happen all the time.

Your lighting impacts how much HVAC you need, your watering rate impacts how much HVAC you need. Your watering rate, you know, fundamentally impacts how much lighting you need, in some ways. All of this stuff needs to be considered together when you're designing a room to be successful. And so, I encourage you to take a really holistic view of that room.

Similarly, on the maintenance and operation side, every aspect of that room needs to be functioning at tip top shape in order for that room to be successful. A single thing failing fails the whole room. And so, when you're thinking about that, ensure that you're not jumping to my lights failed. Well, why did your lights fail? Well, because my fuse blew, well, why did my fuse blow?

Well, we've talked about how sunrises and sunsets can reduce your grid impacts. That may be one of the reasons that you're having trouble running a successful facility. There's lots of little impacts and little, you know, the butterfly effect in these rooms is very real. So, ensuring that you're looking at that room as a system, both in design and operation, is critically important to its overall success and how much money you're going to make out of that building.

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