With the current crisis of loadshedding darkening our streets and grow rooms. It's becoming more and more difficult to grow a quality indoor crop.

In this article, we will discuss ways you can save your indoor harvests from the inevitable loadshedding sweeping our nation. Indoor cultivation is not for everyone and the traditional method of growing cannabis in Africa has always been outdoors. Although indoor cannabis cultivation is a fairly new hobby for many, a lot of us do not realise the expense and responsibility of growing a cannabis crop indoors. If you have already invested or about to invest in grow equipment for indoors here are some great tips for you to consider.

Energy Efficiency

Just like technology, the cannabis industry is evolving rapidly and new growing products are hitting the markets every month. LED lights might be an expensive option initially but they could save you a lot of stress in the future and not to mention free your plants up from stress to. LED’s are now almost comparable in yield to the older high-intensity discharge ( HID ) electricity-hungry lights from a couple of years ago. With embedded efficient technologies, these lights consume much less power and also give a lot less heat.

For instance, a 600watt HID will increase the temperature of your room by 5 degrees Celsius, so if you planning on more than one HID lamp you will need to plan your flow both in and out of your rooms. This is yet another piece of equipment you will need to consider, fans. Cannabis requires freshly circulated air continuously, and also requires an ambient temperature of about 20-25°C to grow well. If you consider that a small grow room requires at least 1000 watts to grow just a few plants, you can imagine the heat that is built up in just a few minutes without sufficient airflow.

Looking at your energy efficiency is an important task to plan before setting out to purchase your equipment, especially now that we are experiencing anything between stage 2 and stage 6 loadshedding. Your plants cannot afford to be without lights for this many hours and may lead them to stress out.

Backup it up

Thousands of South Africans have invested backup solutions at a great cost to run their homes and offices. With the amount of money you invest in an indoor grow operation, it would be wise to look at a backup solution for your plants too. If you have considered all factors upfront and looked at energy-efficient lights and fans.

You could be in like as most LED lights do not require much power to run. A simple solar setup or small petrol generator will easily suffice. But these options will also set you back a couple thousand, depending on your requirements and needs. Keeping your growing environment stable is a very important factor to grow quality flowers. A couple of hours of darkness here or there would not be too disastrous, but stage 4 loadshedding will cause your plants to stress and may even invite disease or bugs.

The simplest loadshedding solution

Without a doubt, energy efficiency and backup solutions are imperative to keep your plants happy. Your alternative is to grow outdoors under the hot African sun, the way nature intended.