Marijuana Grow Room Meters, Monitors & Controllers

When you’re a marijuana grower, technology is your friend.

Technology helps you ensure your cannabis plants get everything they need.

It helps you monitor and control your marijuana plants’ environment, water, nutrition, temperature, and other important factors that have big impact on plant health.

Of all the tech a marijuana grower can use, meters, monitors, and controllers are at the top of the list.

So we’re giving you a list of the favorite hydroponics grow room technologies the BigBudsMag.com grow team uses in our marijuana grow ops…

Many marijuana growers know about measuring light intensity. But there’s something else you should measure: photosynthetically active radiation (PAR).

PAR is radiation in light wavelengths that drive photosynthesis, which is the main metabolic engine powering your marijuana plants.

The reason you measure PAR is to see which hydroponics grow bulbs have high intensity and high enough PAR intensity.

The important fact to remember is that although high intensity may provide a large amount of PAR intensity, there are high intensity hydroponics bulbs that lack PAR intensity.

We like the Quantum handheld PAR meter that sells for around $170.

When you want to measure overall light intensity, we recommend the Hanna portable lux meter that retails for around $125.

If you have an IPhone, you can use this app to turn your phone into a lux meter!

You probably already know that adding carbon dioxide (C02) to your lights-on marijuana grow room air increases growth rate, plant health, and yield.

Background C02 is rising due to the burning of fossil fuels. It’s now about 400 parts per million.

When you add C02 to your grow room air (I prefer 1100 ppm), your plants love it.

Take a look here at handheld and wall-mounted C02 meters, monitors, and controllers.

If you use Grodan rockwool, you can get a Grodan metering system that tells you precisely what’s going on in your rockwool.

If you’re not familiar with rockwool, it’s one of the purest, most inert root zone media materials you can use in hydroponics marijuana growing.

Grodan makes a wide range of rockwool types with different qualities of drainage, grain, packaging, and other factors.

Other than pure water culture such as deep water culture and aeroponics, using rockwool as a root zone substrate is a great way to do hydroponics marijuana growing with total control over plant nutrition, pH, oxygenation, and watering.

On the other end of the root zone spectrum is soil.

Some marijuana growers prefer soil, but they’ll admit soil is challenging to work with because you have a very hard time monitoring and controlling soil pH and soil moisture.

Most soil meters we’ve used have been absolute junk. You’ll see soil pH and soil moisture meters that retail for $25, and they just don’t work at all. They’re toys.

However, we’ve had reasonable success with this Bluelab soil pH meter, and this soil moisture test unit.

These units aren’t cheap, but if you’ve been growing cannabis in soil and experienced the harsh effects of bad soil pH or soil that’s too wet or too dry, you benefit by spending your money on soil meters that actually work.

For measuring water pH, our marijuana grow team has ultimate faith in the Bluelab combo meter that measures pH and parts per million very accurately.

When you want a continual monitoring of your marijuana nutrients water, you can use a meter that constantly monitors pH, parts per million (EC), and water temperature.

This dual meter has a pH electrode that’s easy to clean and lasts a long time.

It’s also the only pH meter that costs less than $600 that can accurately measure the pH of zero parts per million reverse osmosis water.

Another very interesting meter is a “BRIX” meter.

Marijuana growers use BRIX meters to determine the carbohydrate content percentage of their marijuana plants.

High carbohydrate content in marijuana plants creates healthier plants, increased resistance to diseases and pests, faster growth, and heavier, tastier buds.

If you use a BRIX meter and find that your marijuana plant tissue has a BRIX rating lower than 12, you should do what most professional marijuana growers do: add carbohydrates, beneficial microbes, and enzymes to your marijuana root zone.

My line-up of hydroponics products for achieving high BRIX includes Bud Candy, Microbial Munch, Voodoo Juice, Piranha, and Tarantula beneficial microbes, and SensiZym.

Look for an article on marijuana and BRIX here at BigBudsMag.com very soon.

Hydroponics grow room meters and monitors are essential technology, but when you have a hydroponics grow room controller, you have technology that monitors conditions and then adjusts them.

There are many types of monitor-controllers, and growers who use them often use tech that focuses on grow room environment.

These devices hook up to air conditioning, dehumidifers, C02 generators, and other equipment that alters grow room temperature, C02 and humidity.

When the monitoring unit senses a temperature higher than the grower’s set maximum temperature, it turns on an air conditioner.

My favorite marijuana grow room environmental controller is the Titan Controls Saturn 6 controller.

When I see marijuana growers running massive grow ops with dozens or even hundreds of cannabis plants, I notice they use a nutrients controller.

These are sometimes called doseometers. They monitor parts per million and pH, and they send nutrients and pH adjusting liquids into grow op reservoirs to maintain optimum ppm and pH.

Here’s one of the reliable doseometers I’ve seen.

Marijuana grow room metering, monitoring, and controller technology isn’t cheap, and there’s a learning curve.

But when you invest in the technology I’ve described in this article, you get more data and more power so your marijuana plants give you bigger, better harvests.

You also save money and give yourself more free time, especially when you use hydroponics controllers, because technology does some of your marijuana grow room work for you!