08 Dec 2020 - Alex Artigues
I made the decision to start growing in early 2020. From the start I knew I wanted to keep everything in the garage. I had no idea what kind of challenges I was in for. At the same time, a good friend and former co-worker started his own grow indoors and we began to deal with some of the same automation problems together.
The garage has large swings in humidity and temperature that can make it difficult to tune automation gear properly for all conditions. High airflow is required to deal with tent temperatures, and there is no AC. If the humidity in the tent stops rising for any reason, the fans can stall, and then the environment can begin to fall apart.
There are good things going on in the home grow world for tent automation. There are several cloud environment monitors available that put our tent data right in our hands. There are exhaust controllers which can trigger on both humidity and temperature. We can add smart outlets and individual controllers with their own sensors for a result that has drift between the metrics our devices use to trigger. Further, We can look to solutions for larger grows that require many components working in concert together.
After evaluating all the ways to control my garage tents, Jake and I could not help but wonder, “Isn’t there just one box that does everything?”.
The upcoming GrowBuds.IO controller gracefully delivers all the key pieces of automation for a tent grow. Make sure to sign up for the newsletter!