So, you now operate a fully functioning, professional cannabis grow room. Welcome to the big leagues! Moving forward, maintaining proper indoor grow room climate and, more specifically, humidity will be essential to maximizing your yield and your profits.
That’s why we’ve put together a simple list of Do’s and Don’ts to help guide you and your employees toward success in an increasingly competitive cannabis industry.
Do
Use Equipment Tailored to Your Needs
For higher yield, output and profit, you’ll want to consider using equipment that was built specifically for your needs. For example, a lot of growers may think that portable, home-use dehumidifiers are going to cut it when trying to balance their grow room humidity. However, these home-use dehumidifiers weren’t designed to pull moisture from the air at the low, autumn-like temperatures that cannabis requires to fully mature.
Not to mention, human beings add roughly ten pounds of water to the air each day. Likewise, a cannabis plant, on average, adds roughly eight pounds of water to the air each day. The difference is, there may only be five people in your home, whereas you may have 100 cannabis plants in your grow room. If you’re keeping up with the math, portable, home-use dehumidifiers aren’t equipped to handle the removal of 800 pounds of moisture a day.
Get the gear you need to succeed.
Find Balance in Your Environment
It’s important to maintain a balanced environment throughout your grow room. This is essential to minimize risking rot or powdery mildew infiltrating your crops.
“What a lot of people don’t understand is that [your indoor grow room] has to be balanced with maintaining a really healthy environment for the plants, one that is less prone to pests and disease,” Devin Liles, VP of Production at The Farm II tells Cannabis Business Times. “The goal is to balance efficiency and the health and vigor of the crop overall: balancing adequate airflow, while at the same time maximizing the light you’re using as well as the space.”
Learn more about how to balance your grow room environment.
Measure Twice, Cut Once
It’s important in every business for entrepreneurs to double-check their work before making rash decisions. Knowing the exact specifications of your grow and the goals you’d like to achieve will go a long way toward helping you maximize your yield and your profits.
For that, we’re always available to help.
Using our sizing calculator, you’ll be able to see how tailor-made equipment fits in your indoor grow room, allowing your business to thrive. For questions, comments or more precise estimates, contact a supplier directly.
Don’t
Waste Energy on Portable Devices
As we mentioned above, portable, home-use dehumidifiers aren’t able to pull their weight in professional grow rooms. Because of this, these home dehumidifiers are incredibly inefficient. They have to work much harder in order to do less than half the work our tailor-made dehumidifiers are capable of achieving. This added energy cost would almost certainly cut into your bottom line.
If you’re going to go pro, control your grow with equipment that was built specifically for you.
Expect Basement Techniques to Work
This isn’t your basement grow operation anymore. Your old cultivation techniques aren’t likely to translate to the big leagues.
Brett Eaton, Director of Horticulture at American Cannabis Co. expanded on this for Cannabis Business Times saying, “Don’t hire unskilled labor, operate in a facility that can’t maintain a proper environment, operate without understanding production costs or begin operations without addressing an efficient building layout and future expansion.”
Allow Temperature Swings
Cannabis is highly sensitive to temperature and humidity swings, which could stunt your yield. Reinforcing that need for a balanced environment we discussed above, you’ll want to make sure your indoor grow room environment is controlled with precision.
Consider logging indoor environmental conditions in your grow room throughout the day, every day, to minimize the damage done to your investment.
Become Impatient
This is important: allow your crops to fully mature before you begin your harvest. You’ve spent months tending to your crop, and you want to be able to maximize your yield as best you can.
According to HighTimes.com, “There are various methods by which even the most amateur grower can tell when buds are truly ripe for the picking. The simplest and quickest way to know is by examining the pistils, or long hairs, that cover the plant’s buds. At the onset of flowering, these pistils are white and stringy. But as the flowering period comes to an end, they begin to turn color, first from white to orange and then again to a dark red or brown. These color changes signify the maturation of the buds; however, the color and time frame may vary significantly across different varieties of cannabis.”
It can be tempting to begin your harvest as soon as possible, but wait until the right moment. If you’ve done everything right up to this point, why spoil it by being restless. Be patient and reap the benefits of a lush, full crop.
Know more. Grow more.
Have a question? Need help getting started? Give us a call at 1-800-972-3710 or drop us a line.