Free Grow Room Climate Performance Assessment

A grower with a humidity problem usually gets one answer from the HVAC industry: you need a bigger system. Sometimes that is true. Often it is not, and the facility spends six figures to end up with the same room. The Climate Performance Assessment is the step that should come first. We look at how your facility was designed to perform, measure how it is actually performing, and show you the gap between the two in your own numbers.

Why We Don't Start With a Quote

Walk a facility with a climate problem and you will hear the same story. Humidity climbs in late flower. One room never quite holds. The team has raised the fan speed, dropped the setpoint, added a portable dehumidifier in the corner. Nothing sticks, and the assumption hardens that the system was undersized from day one.

That assumption is expensive, and it is often wrong. A room that will not hold can be failing for at least four different reasons, and they cost wildly different amounts to fix. A compressor circuit that stopped running. A setpoint that is quietly working against the equipment. A room whose airflow never matched its canopy. Or, genuinely, a system that was never sized for the load it is carrying now.

You cannot tell those apart by walking the room. They all look the same from the floor: the number on the wall is wrong. They look completely different in the data.

The cheapest fix and the most expensive fix present with identical symptoms.

So we start where the difference is visible. Before we recommend anything, we want to know what the equipment was built to do, what it is doing now, and what is standing between those two states. That answer decides everything downstream, including whether you should be buying anything at all.

How the Climate Performance Assessment Works

Three representative rooms give us what we need: one flower room, one veg room, and one curing space. Those three cover the range of loads a cultivation facility asks its climate system to handle, from peak transpiration to near-zero cooling demand with real dehumidification demand.

1. Design review: what the system was supposed to do

   We reconstruct the mechanical intent from what exists on paper. Equipment schedules and capacity ratings, sensible and latent split, design entering and leaving conditions, airflow, room volumes and ceiling heights, lighting power and photoperiod, irrigation volume and timing, ventilation and makeup air. From that we calculate the moisture load the system was engineered to carry, expressed in gallons per day, which becomes the reference every measurement is compared against.

2. Live evaluation: what it is actually doing

   We connect to your controls and pull roughly 75 days of historical trend data alongside live parameters. Runtime and cycle frequency, head pressure behavior per refrigerant circuit, supply and return temperature and humidity, fault codes, setpoint history, response lag. A single snapshot would flag dozens of deviations that are just noise. A long trend separates the chronic condition from the bad afternoon.

3. The gap, and what is causing it

   Then we do the arithmetic that matters. Actual moisture removal against design moisture removal. Time in band against setpoint. Cooling commanded against cooling delivered, circuit by circuit. That comparison is what isolates root cause, and it is usually more specific than anyone expects. Not "the system is struggling," but which circuit on which unit stopped producing, and what that costs you in gallons per day.

4. Four paths, priced and ranked

   Findings become a prioritized action plan built around four options, ordered by cost and involvement. You see all four together, with what each one buys you, so the decision is yours to make with the numbers in front of you rather than ours to make on your behalf.

The Four Paths: Optimize, Restore, Supplement, Replace

Every assessment ends the same way structurally: four options, presented together, from the one that costs nothing to the one that replaces the system. We recommend among them, but we show you all four, because the right answer depends on how you intend to run the rooms and that is your call to make.

The order is deliberate. We would rather tell you to change a setpoint than sell you a rooftop unit, and we would rather be trusted on the fourth recommendation because we were honest about the first three.

What One Grow Room Assessment Found

A greenhouse cultivation operation running eight flower rooms off four rooftop air handlers called about humidity. Rooms were drifting, one badly, and the working assumption on site was that the units had been undersized for the canopy.

Thirty days of trend data said something else. On three of the four units, refrigerant circuits were being commanded to cool and never building head pressure. The compressors were not running. The units were calling for cooling they could not deliver, so the fans ran at full while the rooms drifted on humidity. The fourth unit, mechanically healthy, held its temperature band 97.5% of the time and its humidity setpoint 99.9% of the time. The design was fine. The equipment was broken.

The second finding was the one nobody expected. Even the healthy unit was removing only about 40% of the moisture it was designed to remove. That is not a defect. The rooms were being held roughly 5°F cooler and 9°F drier at the dewpoint than the design condition the equipment was selected for, and you cannot condense water out of air that is already dry. The setpoint choice was starving the coil of the latent load it was built to handle, capping sustainable watering rate, and capping yield with it. It was also making the compressors run longer and cycle harder than the load justified, which is a direct driver of the failures now on the roof.

So the first recommendation cost nothing: return the rooms to their design condition. The second was a compressor repair scope in the neighborhood of $30,000. Replacing the affected air handlers, the path the facility had assumed it was heading toward, would have run about $1.6 million and would not have addressed the operating practice that broke the first set.

What You Receive

The deliverable is a written report your mechanical contractor, your CFO, and your head grower can each read for their own reasons.

• Design baseline. What the installed system was engineered to deliver, including design moisture removal in gallons per day, room by room.
• Performance findings. How the system actually performed across the data window, with the specific deviations and the evidence behind each one.
• Root cause analysis. Which component, circuit, or operating practice is producing the gap, and which plausible explanations the data rules out.
• Four costed paths. Optimize, Restore, Supplement, and Replace, with a recommendation and a priority order.
• Interim strategy. If a repair has a lead time, the no-cost operational moves that protect the crop while you wait.
• Success metrics. What to measure after implementation to confirm the fix landed, benchmarked against your own best-performing equipment.

What We Need From You

Less than you would expect. The assessment is designed to run alongside a live cycle without interrupting it.

• Access to your controls. Read-only credentials on your existing platform, or a secure remote connection we set up with Tailscale.
• Historical trend data. Roughly 75 days is the target. We can work with less, but the longer window is what separates chronic faults from noise.
• Three representative rooms. One flower, one veg, one cure.
• Whatever documentation exists. Equipment submittals, mechanical drawings, permit sets. Partial is fine. We reconstruct what is missing.
• A conversation about the crop. Cultivar, canopy density, irrigation strategy, lighting, and how you actually run the rooms day to day.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Honest Version of This Conversation

We build purpose-built HVACD equipment, and we are not pretending otherwise. What we are not willing to do is walk into a facility assuming the answer is our product.

A grower fighting humidity deserves to know whether the problem is a setpoint, a dead compressor, a room that outgrew its airflow, or a system at the end of its life, because those four answers cost between nothing and a great deal of money. Sorting them takes data, and most facilities are already sitting on the data. It just has not been read.

That is the whole idea. Read what your building has been telling you, then decide.