Aloha Green, the first licensed cannabis cultivator in Hawaii, recently brought its greenhouse grow online. But before the company set up that building, it began growing cannabis in a 2,000-square-foot enclosed indoor grow, which included the installation of Quest dehumidification units. In a Q&A with Cannabis Business Times, Aloha Green’s COO Tai Cheng shares what went into designing these indoor spaces and how a smart dehumidification strategy helped create an ideal climate.
Cannabis Business Times: Can you tell us about the grow?
Tai Cheng, Aloha Green: We’re growing on agricultural land – old Dole Pineapple land. It’s been growing pineapple and other fruits and vegetables for almost 100 years. It’s great, fertile land, and we wanted to get up and running as soon as possible. So we took a number of 40-foot shipping containers – and we recreated the structures to [become] grow pods. … We decided we could build up our own because it was just easier – we had all the equipment here, and it’d be cheaper than shipping a finished product from the mainland over to the island. So what we have is a number of shipping containers [with] lights, HVAC, dehumidification, a watering system, CO2 supplementation, and of course, a number of fans and sensors. So it’s environmentally controlled. … We have a computer system that measures all the inputs and controls.
CBT: In this type of unconventional space, what were some of the special considerations you needed to take to ensure you were properly regulating humidity?
TC: Shipping containers, they have some good functionality, [and] they’re cheap, first of all, relatively to the amount of square footage you can obtain. Another good thing is that they’re relatively sealed. But one thing we had to do was make sure we filled all the nooks and crannies in, and made sure there was no entrance for pests, as well as mold or bacteria.
You have to be very careful as well [with] what kind of solvents and paints and chemicals that you use when it comes to cleaning, as well as prepping the container. There are always residuals that can leach into the plant later on that you’re not aware of, especially volatile organic compounds (VOCs), so we had to be really careful about that.
Aloha Green's dispensary storefront on the island of Oahu.
We decided to go with HPS lights, which of course, have a high BTU output. So we needed to make sure we removed as much of that hot air as possible. … And we also made sure we [purchased] a good dehumidifier.
What we wanted to do is [create] a steady humidity. Whether it’s high, whether it’s low is not as important as that you don’t see fluctuations – [swings that are] up and down when it comes to humidity and temperature. That’s when you can see mold, powdery mildew. If water has to accumulate on the buds or the flower, that’s when you see major problems.
… One thing, in addition to humidity, you have to measure is VPD or vapor pressure deficit. [Editor's note: Read more on VPD and BTU in '4 Factors to Know About Dehmidification.'] What we were finding when the plants were very small, they weren’t transpiring a lot. There wasn’t a lot of water in there. So we actually had to introduce a little bit of humidity and water during the first part of the grow. And that’s something we never thought we had to do.
CBT: How did you get connected to the team at Quest?
TC: We were lucky enough to meet Clif [Tomasini] and the team at Quest when they were here at the Hawaii Expo. I’ve seen their units at a number of high-end and high-class grows on the mainland already. Their units are commercial grade. They’re used not only in the grows themselves, but I’ve seen them in laboratories manufacturing cannabis product, as well as in drying and cure rooms.
When we met Clif there, we decided to grab one of his units. We wanted to test it. And what we found out is that it worked really well with [our Argus Controls] system. That sampling period had been greatly reduced. I think the power and the efficiency of the unit as well really helped with maintaining humidity. We were shocked. After the first days of starting to use it, we really liked the humidity maintenance it was able to do. It was able to keep very stable humidity throughout the night, and even in the morning.
That’s something that’s aided our computer system as well, because those environment controlled systems can start to be predictive. So prior to the lights coming on, we were able to set it so that the system would ramp up to 100 percent. So it was able to take a bite out of that spike coming up.
We were really happy with that particular unit. What we ended up doing was that we replaced all of our dehumidification units with Quest units.
[We also have a] Quest unit in the dry/cure room, [which] has been able to maintain – I think we’re at 50-percent or 60-percent [humidity]. It’s perfect. … We’re [also] using it for a bunch of flower rooms. And we’re going to be putting them in our manufacturing rooms as well.
Images courtesy of Aloha Green
