New Options for Managing the Cannabis Greenhouse Environment
April 16, 2020 
The COVID-19 pandemic means that some greenhouse operations, including cannabis growers, might have fewer staff on hand to walk through the greenhouse.
This makes having the right environmental controls system all the more important. Here are two recent innovations growers should know about.
Sensaphone Express II
Maintaining precise environmental conditions is critical to cultivating healthy plants at cannabis growing facilities. The Sensaphone Express II monitoring system is ideal for larger greenhouse facilities that require many monitoring points, or operations that are considering future growth, because it is expandable to include up to 40 channels.
The Express II system provides 24/7 monitoring of cannabis growing facility conditions such as temperature, humidity, ventilation, carbon dioxide, and power failure to help prevent the loss of valuable plants and equipment. When the Express II system detects that a sensor reading has moved out of the preset range, it immediately alerts up to 48 people with custom phone calls, allowing personnel to quickly address the situation.
Operators can easily increase monitoring capability with easy-to-install expansion input and output cards. The LCD display shows continuous input status and assists with keypad programming for simple setup.
Housed in a NEMA-4X enclosure, the Express II unit is protected from dust, dirt, and moisture both indoors and out. The internal rechargeable battery backup provides 12 hours of continuous monitoring and alerts in the event of a power outage.
Trym Software
Traditionally, cannabis growers have used environmental controls as isolated systems. However, Trym, a Novato, CA-based cannabis farm management and compliance software company, has developed tools that allow you to track and link environmental conditions to each batch of plants. In doing so, Trym software enables you to see the cause-and-effect relationship between your grow conditions and resulting yields.
“We know how important environmental data is to running a cultivation business, as well as to our analytics,” says Matt Mayberry, CEO of Trym. “With our IoT integration system, we’re able to execute new hardware integrations in hours rather than weeks, providing growers the freedom to select the systems that make the most sense for their businesses.”
Thanks to a new partnership, Trym can now monitor and link Argus and TrolMaster sensor data, like temperature, humidity, and CO2, to the plant batches grown in their respective rooms or zones. In addition to environmental monitoring, cultivators can schedule employee tasks, like planting, feeding, and harvesting, and review harvest analytics. This creates a customized and compliant system for cultivators to optimize and scale their business operations.
Click here for a closer look at other recent developments in environmental controls from suppliers such as Bartlett Instrument, Wadsworth Control Systems, and others.
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