Light fixture ballasts or drivers are certainly not the most discussed technology in cannabis cultivation, but they should be. The deceivingly benign driver has an outsized impact on your growing climate, maintenance costs, environmental flexibility and production quality.
Most LED horticultural lights come with the driver built into the fixture or tethered close by. That's dozens, if not hundreds, of fixtures pumping out heat, electrical noise, failing, and littering the room with unnecessary wiring and infrastructure, and causing lost production..
But what would happen if you could decouple the power from each fixture?
Imagine a world where every fixture was up to 10 pounds lighter and required minimal wiring. First, installing a room full of lights with remote drivers reduces infrastructure costs and considerations simply because each light is just so much lighter.
Second, with no driver, no two-wire 0-10V dimming connection is required, eliminating the need for all the additional wiring for dimming and synchronization. A remote driver system eliminates all fixture-to-fixture dimming wiring, but allows for precise control without the tangle of wires.
Traditional on-fixture drivers require step-down controls to decrease voltage from 480V 3-phase to 240/277V. This doubles the lighting panels, electrical receptacles and requires commercial relay contactors to turn the power off to the fixtures. Contactors are one of the most costly components of any buildout.
You can ditch the driver complications all together and have a plug-and-play system where the digital power servers with built-in diagnostics and controls that virtually eliminate in grow room maintenance, removes heat and offers a clean room GMP design for the food and pharmaceutical grade products that are being cultivated.
LED grow lighting is constantly marketed as a low-heat alternative to traditional HID lighting. But the truth is that most LED fixtures still produce a measurable degree of heat - with additional heat contribution courtesy of the onboard power system.
When you consider it's never just a single fixture producing heat but hundreds or even thousands, the additional heat from the drivers are compounded to impact the growing environment and put an untold amount of pressure on the HVAC system.
Eliminating the driver from the grow room environment immediately reduces all driver-related heat concerns and allows the HVACD system to focus on conditioning heat directly related to the photons and growing The grow environment is already challenging enough to control. It only makes sense to eliminate one of the largest sources of uncontrolled heat. Plants are happier, and so is your HVAC system, which means lower operating costs..
Drivers are the first component of a grow light to fail. When they fail, all the work needed to identify and replace the broken component has to happen in and around your plants. But maintenance in the grow room disrupts the plant's carefully controlled photoperiod. It can also mean working around (or worse, over the top of) the canopy.
The solution is clear: Remove the driver. Disruptive Maintenance is instantly eliminated by removing drivers from the grow environment and going to a high quality industrial grade plug’n play digital remote power servers installed outside of the grow rooms..Imagine walking up to a cabinet, having warning indication to plug’n play a hot swappable module and that’s it, done.
Many commercial cultivators grow several strains within a grow room. With typical fixtures, optimizing lighting for each strain is almost impossible because each driver is restricted to a two-wire 0-10V dimming setup, necessitating an extra Y cable for synchronizing multiple fixtures or an RS485 junction link. To translate: All fixtures are grouped together, restricting individual zone management.
Decoupling the driver and installing remote power servers removes the need for wiring between fixtures, enabling individual or grouped fixture zoning for more accurate control and infinite configurations, without complications. This means precision lighting control for each zone/strain in your room for better outcomes at harvest time.
Truthfully, most cultivators have never considered the possibility that lighting could exist without an onboard driver. Drivers, with all their issues, have always come part and parcel with traditional light fixtures, whether they were HPS or LED.
But we saw things differently eight years ago..
With so many issues stemming directly from an onboard driver, designing a new approach to grow room lighting made sense. To this end, we've pioneered remote power servers, eliminating traditional on-fixture drivers — and thereby eliminating the issues.
TSRgrow's Advanced LED Lighting Solution with remote driver technology reduces the load on the HVAC system, translating into operational cost savings. It's all built on plug-n-play technology, making it simple to add, remove, or scale your system in a simple and modular way.
Maintenance is centralized outside the grow rooms or in a nearby server room, ensuring no disruption to the photoperiod or canopy. It's also a proactive system thanks to built-in diagnostics.
Onboard drivers are the catalysts for so many cultivation issues, yet for years, the industry has just resigned itself to them. But, it's time to consider the cost and time savings of a grow room designed around a remote-power system.
TSRgrow's Remote Power Solution solves many of the longstanding issues growers have with their grow light fixtures, from HVAC burden to environmental control to challenging maintenance. We think it's long past time to change the way we approach grow-room lighting and get the most value from your investment. Consider some of the other benefits; increase consistent quality production that can generate millions more revenue while reducing utility usage and cost.
Ready to see the difference cutting-edge grow room technology can make? It’s time to ditch the driver and let TSRgrow help you grow more efficiently. Contact us today to learn how.