- Hey guys, this is Nate Storey with Bright Agrotech and today we're going to do a quick
video on HVAC and what it means to indoor growers.
HVAC is heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.
What it describes is the systems that take indoor air circulate it around, treat it,
and either cool it down, heat it up, or dehumidify it.
Most growers use HVAC in some way shape or form.
Especially as you get more and more intensive, HVAC becomes more and more critical to the
success of your operation.
If you're doing a very very small setup, you may get away without using HVAC, but the larger
you get, once you start doing CO2 supplementation, once you start to basically dehumidify your
air fairly aggressively or cool your air because you've got so many lights.
HVAC becomes a critical part of your operation.
HVAC is an expensive cap ex and it can be a fairly expense operating expense as well.
HVAC is not cheap especially as we get more and more intensive as we cram more plants
into less space we have more issues with humidity.
We have more issues with mold and fungi and all of the kind of things that happen when
we just cram a lot of plants together.
We also have much much higher cooling costs for most growing environments.
That's just because once you cram those plants together and really light them up, you create
a lot of heat that you need to take care of.
You know, systems vary in quality, and they vary in price.
Ultimately they're going to be within a certain range.
Now the big difference in my mind and in our minds, is between traditional condenser based
air conditioner systems and water chillers.
We tend to move more towards water cooling than air cooling.
The reason that we do that is, we like to water cool our lights.
It gives us a little bit more control over the growing environment and we've found that
we can actually run a whole bunch of other types of equipment on chilled water a little
bit easier, more efficiently as a grower, than we can with these big bulky air conditioning
systems.
One thing you have to thing about with HVAC is your intent to scale and that's something
that you should be thinking about if you intend for your farm to be a lot bigger down the
road, than I would invest in a higher quality system that can be scaled over time.
You can buy some really small cheap options, but those are really only reliable or doable
on a very small scale so if you intend to get big, if you intend to make money, if you
intend to scale your facility, it's worth putting aside a budget just for HVAC.
Yeah there are lots of ways you can reduce your HVAC costs.
You know the simplest way is to just rely on a lot of ventilation if you're in an area
where the air is typically cool enough that you can cool your facility with outside air.
Now that introduces all sorts of other problems, right.
You can bring in pests, it's an imperfect solution because sometimes it's very hot outside
and it's very hot inside, but ultimately you know that's by far the cheapest way to get
some of this work done.
Most folks that are really serious that want fine tuned and high levels of control, have
to go over to a commercial HVAC system.
Those become much more expensive.
Now how expensive it is ultimately depends on how big the system is, so the bigger the
system is, the cheaper it gets on a per ton basis.
Also then the local installation costs and we've found these to be very variable across
the United States and across the world.
For most growers you can get into pretty reasonable systems if you have a relatively large setup.
One thing that we've really looked at is how we take five and seven ton chillers and use
combinations of five and seven ton chillers scaled to cool very large facilities efficiently.
If you already have a method for heating and cooling, then you kind of already have some
level of rudimentary HVAC.
Now the question to ask yourself is whether you could get more out of it, if it was an
HVAC system that was really purpose built for your facility.
That means purpose built for air filtration, purpose built for dehumidification, purpose
built around the equipment that you're running.
If you have so many lights in your environment, you know what kind of BTU's you're producing
and you can size your HVAC system appropriately.
Those are the kinds of things that you really need to be thinking about.
We like to do some of the HVAC ourselves or at least reduce the cost of HVAC by using
water chillers to chill our lights.
We can do that pretty much all in house and that reduces our overall HVAC cost significantly.
Depending on your lighting type and depending on your situation, those costs can be pretty
darn high.
Especially once you get in to purpose built systems.
However, I would say that most of the time a purpose built system is worth it.
There are lots of resources out there on HVAC if you want to learn more.
There are increasingly more and more of these becoming available.
The first place I'd go is to Upstart University we've got a great webinar up at Upstart University.
I think it's 10 bucks to access the webinar.
It's also 10 bucks for a month subscription to USU and it's free through USU so it's probably
worth just getting a month subscription to Upstart University and watching the webinar
and then of course checking out some of the other resources there.
We also will have some blog posts coming out on this subject, so we're going to try to
get you the best possible information through the blog.
Make sure you check that out.
Thank you guys so much for watching and as always please subscribe, subscriptions are
how we measure our success.
It's how we measure whether what we're producing is something that you guys want and something
that you guys need.
It's also a way for us to get you the most timely and the best possible information to
you directly instead of having to go out and try and find this crazy stuff on the intertubes.
Make sure you tune in, make sure you subscribe, and we'll look forward to getting a lot more
great content to you in the future.