If you have been around the indoor gardening scene or have been growing with more
than a few lights for ten years or longer, it’s
likely that aside from the increase in popularity
of your favorite past time, you have also seen
it become more of a “year round” endevor,
rather than a seasonal venture.
•
Historically speaking in most parts of the world it gets too hot outdoors during summer months, even at night, to be able to rely on
outside air temperatures to keep the temperature from getting too
hot for the crop when HID grow lights are running. In the past, indoor
growers using High Intensity Discharge grow lighting like HPS and
MH relied solely on vent fans drawing cooler outside air through the
room and exhausting back outdoors to try and keep temperatures
below 85 Deg F when the lights are operational.
If it’s already 70 Deg F or warmer outside (in some cases +85 Deg F
already) it’s a losing battle, and plants produce poorly-and at great
cost and headaches to the grower.
While hydroponics methods that used larger reservoir volumes and
water chillers allowed some gardeners to harvest healthy and productive crops, most gardeners opted to shut-down the grow room for the
summer and enjoy the outdoors. Air cooled lighting offers benefits in
some situations too.
For professionals, this created a level of fluctuation in the supply and
demand end of the trade-as with most seasonal markets.
Enter Grow Room Air Conditioning
H&M Heat Exchangers took root in 2002 in the B.C Lower Mainland
during the height of the Western Canadian hydro-boom by providing
cooling solutions that allowed indoor gardeners using multiple HID
lighting sources to operate year-round, even during summer months
with no decline in production levels or crop quality.
Growers of the day tended to be adamant Do-It-Yourselfers, and typically did not entertain the thought of hiring outside HVAC technicians
to come in and install an Air Conditioning System into their growing
operations. Normally, it requires a licensed technician to work with
44
www.grozine.com
refrigerant-the stuff in Air Conditioner
Compressor Lines.
In much of the lower mainland water was
un-metered. Why not, it rains onto the
mountains all winter on it’s way back to
the ocean. Most locations simply paid
a monthly sewer charge, and if it was
metered, there was typically a “maximum
rate” the water company would charge.
This may sound very wasteful and unfathomable in some parts of the world-but
the stuff falls from the sky most of the
year in the Pacific North West.
Swamp Coolers” were the first grow
room cooling adopted by savvy growers
in the BC Mainland, and H&M started
to source and offer efficient units, that
Desmond and Co at H&M, modified with
speciality controls and other features that
made them easy to install in any growing location. Re-circulating hydroponic
systems like the early “bucket systems”
that growers fabricated themselves also
lended well to the addition of reservoir
chilling. Cooling coils and plug and play
water solenoid with thermostat controls
were, and still are, one of H&M Heat
Exchangers’ offerings available for global
shipment.
It wasn’t long before H&M and enterprising growers began seeing further potential in what having some cooling power
in your grow room could mean for crop
growth rates and yields. Rather than just
helping to cool the intake air and still
exhaust it outdoors, growers started to
get hip to CEA (Controlled Environment
Agriculture) or “sealed” growing methods.
It didn’t take long to figure out that when
the swamp cooler was operating, that air