In this episode of FAQ with AGIQ, we touch on some of the best practices that exist in control strategies for your rooms. This is a huge topic, but here are some of the big considerations that you have to have as a grower are how your room is going to operate on a day-to-day basis.
Episode Transcription:
In today's episode of FAQ with AGIQ, I'm going to talk about some of the best practices that exist in control strategies for your rooms. And by control strategies, I mean the software or building automation systems that control the day-to-day operation of your rooms. This is a huge topic, so I'm only going to be able to cover this skin deep, but some of the big considerations that you have to have as a grower are how your room is going to operate on a day-to-day basis.
And how that's going to integrate with the systems that allow that to happen. One of those big systems, obviously, is the HVAC system, but you also have your Fertigation, your Lighting Control, CO2 potentially, Building Access you may have integrated with some kind of plant tracking system as well.
There's a lot of different components there, and I think one of the, the hidden aspects to applying HVAC in these rooms is many systems have no built in logic for controls. And so your building automation integrator, your controls guy, is going to be forced to effectively program the unit and the unit operation from scratch, trying to achieve what you want in that room, while he's also responsible for programming the operation of your facility from a more holistic level.
One of the things that you can do to give yourself a leg up there is to apply a piece of equipment that has a built in control strategy. So that you're building automation integrator only has to send a set point to the unit and the unit will figure out how to maintain that set point on its own and that allows you to implement some of the really smart strategies, things like sunrise and sunsetting your lights, having a staggered lights on schedule, which is great from both an electrical demand and from a people management perspective, doing really clever and cutting edge recipes from a fertigation perspective.
All of the things that you actually want to think about from a controls perspective, it gives you the time to do that if your controls guy isn't worrying about how to make the equipment do what you need it to. This is a topic that we could talk about for hours, but that would be my suggestion as sort of the biggest best practice that you could do from a controls perspective is get equipment that has built in controls, that is capable of fully controlling your room out of the box.
Much faster to integrate, much easier to program, and allows you to think about the things that you want to be thinking about.
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