Each rule is listed below with a brief description and a suggested initial value
Heater inhibit
When changing from night to day prevent heater for switching on for 15 minutes. We know that when the lights come on the grow room will warm up quickly so we prevent the heater from coming on just before the lights will come on.
Minimum air change rules
Force fan ON for
Day: 2 mins 0 secs every 1 hrs 30mins
Night:0 mins 30 secs every 4 hrs 0 mins
This will force an air change if the fans have not been operating for other reasons. This will expel humid stale smelly air and bring in ambient CO2. You may want to change these settings between winter and summer.
Allow minimum air change while aircon is operating (tick)
It is good practice to allow minimum air change even when air conditioning is active to expel methane and other stale smelly air
CO2 rules
Inject CO2 (only when not venting or when only F1 is running)
Inject only if measured light greater than (100 J/m2/sec)
If hot, and frequent venting is required, then reduce CO2 to avoid wastage (tick)
Most people will want to avoid wastage and will set the system to only inject CO2 when NOT venting. In fact, the controller will anticipate when venting is required and will minimise wastage by stopping CO2 injection well before venting starts
The second rule ensures that there is adequate light before injecting CO2. This is useful in a glasshouse using natural sunlight in which case it might be set at 400J but in a grow room it is just useful to check that the light has indeed come on in which case a setting of say 50J is more suitable.
The last rule is for a system that is injecting CO2 on a cycle timed basis. If checked, this rule will modify timings to try to avoid CO2 wastage and will completely abort CO2 injection if it is uneconomic. This uses the Autolearn feature of the IntelliClimate
Lighting rule
This rule specifies the minimum gap between light bank 1 switching on and light bank 2.
Normally, 6 minutes is sufficient to allow the power surge from the first bank to subside before the second bank switches on.If electronic ballasts are used it may be possible to reduce this time.
Setpoint ramping
When changing between day and night settings this rule allows a period of time for the settings to change gradually, or ramp, from one value to the other.If this is made too abrupt you can shock the plants and also cause fail safes and alarms to operate
as the system fails to respond quickly enough to the new settings.15 or 20 minutes is usually sufficient.
Humidification inhibit
When changing from day to night inhibit humidification for 30 mins prior to the change.The purpose of this is to ensure that the room and crop are left dry for the night.Remember, that as the room cools down the RH will automatically rise.
Air con rules
Force on air-con during day period (tick)
During hot weather there may be no point in even attempting to use the fan for cooling.
If the air con is forced on for the day period you can also force it on a while before the day period starts, typically 10 minutes. This cools the room down in anticipation of the lights coming on.
Autochange from fans to aircon if temperature exceeds 3 oC above temp target
This rule forces the fans to stop and the aircon to start. Note that once it has switched over it will not switch back this time zone. This means that once it has switched to aircon mode it will not try to switch back to fan mode until the night time zone.
Autostart aircon if outside temp greater than 3oC below temp target
This rule switches immediately to air con if outside temperature rises too close to the target. It assumes that there is no point in wasting time trying to cool the room down by drawing in warm air from outside.
Fail Safe Settings
This group allows some of the fail safes to be customised
Aircon override. If the temperature becomes excessive when in aircon mode the fan will switch on.
Fan fail override. If in fan mode and temperature continues to rise the lights will progressively shut down
Dehumidifier override. If the RH becomes excessive the fans will come on even though the controller is in dehumidifier mode
CO2 fail safe. Switch on all fans if CO2 exceeds 1800ppm.Although CO2 is not poisonous it can cause suffocation.
CO2 injection override. If you run out of CO2 gas and the CO2 level falls below say, 300ppm then the system will revert to using the fans to bring in ambient CO2.
Power failure. These settings allow you to set the minimum cool down period for the lamps (20 mins) and also the timings for the lights to come back on after a power failure.
Light override.If a lamp or bank of lights fails, the light level will fall below a minimum level (50J) and the controller will switch to the alternative bank and trip the alarm if enabled.
NB: Finally there is a button that allows you to restore all advanced settings to their factory default values.
Status (and settings) tab
This screen allows you to view readings and settings for functions that have been enabled in the configuration menu.
Below is shown a typical setup for a system with most aspects enabled.
The first block shows the current readings together with their alarm minima and maxima. The alarm enable allows the alarm to be turned on or off and the detent time helps avoid false triggering as the fault condition has to be present for the full time specified.
In the next block, all the main functions can be enabled, disabled or forced on. Note that when forced on, the function will perform a normal operation for its normal time and then stop automatically.
The “set-point” section is self-explanatory and typical settings are shown above.
Settings (Scheduling) tab
This is where you enter the settings as a schedule for the complete grow period. The line, highlighted in yellow shows the current settings and as time elapses the yellow highlight moves down the table. All the time that it is on a line, those settings are continuously downloaded to the controller. This will normally happen at midnight if the PC is on-line, but if not on-line, it will occur as soon as the PC is reconnected. When the bottom of the schedule is reached, the settings will remain at the values in the last line.
New lines are easily added using the + button and lines are deleted by selecting that day and clicking the X button.
Note that the dates in the table are relative to the specified start date. This means that a schedule that was created for a start date of say, 15 January can easily be reused starting from any other date.
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