Time Your Design Right

After spending over 15 years serving the cannabis industry, we at Surna Cultivation Technologies have found that every grower has one common goal: to start growing plants as soon as possible. It can be tempting to start ordering equipment and hiring contractors to begin work right away. After all, time is money, isn’t it?

That may be true, but it isn’t as simple as hitting the ground running. There are two primary ways cultivators run into project delays and unintentionally go over budget.

On one hand, failing to flesh out your design and coordinate all the moving parts before pulling the trigger on major construction or outfitting decisions will ultimately cost time and money. On the other hand, failing to make timely decisions on processes and equipment can slow down the project and also cost time and money. So how do you dedicate enough time to making informed decisions without giving the whole project a sedative? The answer is simple: Hire the right help and trust the process.

Coordination and design project management

Every decision that is made during the design of your facility will affect something else. That’s why developing an experienced design and construction team is vital to your project’s success. It’s absolutely critical that the design team working on your facility is well-coordinated with a central point of responsibility directing traffic. Sometimes this is the General Contractor (GC), sometimes it’s the architect, and sometimes it’s a project manager designated by the business owner. But no matter what, no decision should ever be made in a vacuum. All design decisions should be coordinated on a regular basis to ensure that there are no conflicts in the field.

Choosing the wrong architect could lead to frustrating and costly construction delays or, even worse, you risk getting stuck with an expensive facility that doesn’t meet your operational needs.

Architecture and Floor Plans

Plants have needs that differ from humans, so find an architect who understands this distinction. Interview architects or firms who have experience in designing for cannabis or other plants. They should have a familiarity of grow room layouts, the need for spaces dedicated to large equipment (e.g. irrigation, harvest/processing, and mechanical rooms) and special security measures that affect how a building is designed.

Choosing an architect specializing in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) provides benefits that go beyond optimizing your facility. Choosing the wrong architect could lead to frustrating and costly construction delays or, even worse, you risk getting stuck with an expensive facility that doesn’t meet your operational needs.

Mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP)

Besides building permits, MEP permits must also be issued for construction to begin. MEP engineers provide services to prepare an indoor grow for operation. Engage an experienced engineering team as soon as possible in the planning process. A good MEP engineer will consider the entire operation when creating the design. They should coordinate closely with architects and construction teams throughout the planning and building stages. Direct cultivation experience is a must.

Mechanical engineers design, specify, and provide permit and construction support primarily related to HVAC. They perform complex load calculations to ensure the climate system is properly sized to handle the heat and moisture loads. Besides ensuring the climate is appropriate, mechanical designs are also critical for cultivation operations for biosecurity, odor control, and energy use. Qualified mechanical engineers understand the questions that must be asked in order to coordinate all the moving parts and deliver a system design that meets all the needs of your cultivation team.

Electrical engineers design the electrical system within the facility. Their designs indicate overall power infrastructure requirements and provide the design roadmap for electricians to follow when installing the electrical systems. Plumbing engineers provide designs related to the unique irrigation and waste removal needs of indoor agriculture and integrate them with the base building plumbing systems. structural Engineering Structural engineers evaluate the structural load on a building and ensure that it’s structurally sound to support the additional equipment associated with cultivation operations. Usually this is roof-mounted HVAC or electrical equipment.

Civil Engineering

Civil engineers are required for projects that have a direct impact on public infrastructure, such as sewage treatment, waterways, or roads and bridges. In cultivation operations, their work usually consists of wastewater disposal and site drainage and can include traffic patterns and access.

Life safety design

Life safety must also be considered in cultivation facility design, and fire codes can vary from municipality to municipality. It’s important you consult the fire marshal’s office in your municipality during the design of the facility to ensure that there are no unpleasant surprises during inspection. Sometimes, interpretation of the fire code and related requirements can be somewhat subjective depending on the fire marshal in your area. Fire safety is one consideration, but something many cultivators overlook is what the fire marshal’s expectations will be associated with CO₂ safety, as most CEA cultivators will use supplemental CO₂ in their facility. Life safety requirements will need to be closely coordinated with electrical, plumbing, mechanical, and building automation designers.

Coordinate your benching and racking system selection in your overall floor plan design to maximize space efficiency and ensure that there are no conflicts in the field.

Benching and Racking

Grow benches and racking systems are necessary for efficiently and cleanly organizing your plants within a grow space. Few growers keep their plants in containers directly on the floor, as doing so makes organizing and tending to plants a hassle while also adding unnecessary hours of labor. Coordinate your benching and racking system selection in your overall floor plan design to maximize space efficiency and ensure that there are no conflicts in the field. Your mechanical design, irrigation system, and lighting systems will all be influenced by your benching and racking system.

Lighting

It is important that you begin your lighting selection early in the facility design process as it will influence architectural, HVAC/mechanical, electrical, and life safety design coordination. As soon as the benching and racking selections are made, you should move onto lighting design. The electrical design, HVAC/mechanical design (required for permitting), and the controls design (not required for permitting, but still a major design undertaking) are essentially held hostage until lighting selections and quantities are made.

Water Purification

Having a clean, consistent supply of water is essential for growing a repeatable product. Water purification allows you to remove particulates, pathogens, and debris, which is why many growers choose to purify their water supply before it’s introduced to their plants. Cultivators often face the challenge of integrating municipal water, reclaimed condensate or reverse osmosis (RO) and irrigation systems. Cultivators often purchase a number of independent systems (for instance, an RO skid and some holding tanks), but fail to plan how they will be controlled or integrated into the entire irrigation strategy.

Considerations you should make include: When does the RO tank need to be filled? How long does the water supply need to be engaged to fill the tank? What happens when the tanks are full? The result of treating the irrigation room like an afterthought is usually a big headache (and a few floods). Working with a mechanical and plumbing design company that can help you with this integration on the front end can be an enormous help on the back end.

Irrigation

While smaller operations may be able to make do with manual watering, medium and large grows are much more efficient when they incorporate an irrigation system into the facility design. This is true not just for the labor associated with plant watering, but for the overall consistency of the process, which ensures predictable costs as well as dependable yield and quality. The volume and method of irrigation will have a direct impact on the dehumidification requirements for your facility, as well as your controls design.

Controls, Data Collection, and Automation

Irrigation, CO₂ delivery and ventilation, fire systems, lighting, and HVAC systems must all be controlled in some manner. Variances in the sophistication of the systems and how you operate them will determine the controls required for your facility.

The extent of your monitoring and automation capabilities should be determined early on. Are you willing to sacrifice higher operating costs for lower initial start-up costs, or are you seeking to invest in the most precise and most energy- and labor-efficient systems? How much visibility do you want in the operation of the facility when you’re not present? How much data do you want to collect about your operation to drive long-term operating decisions?

Your controls system provider must have a deep understanding of all the systems in your facility that they are controlling, how they work, and what the controls needs really are. Controls seem simple, but it’s not just an on/off switch with a nice user interface. Often, complex programming is required behind the scenes to make sure all the various industrial systems you’re using work as intended.

Security

While general security surveillance may be beneficial for most businesses, it is an absolute necessity for cannabis grow operators. In fact, your cultivation license requires it. Security system requirements vary from state-to-state, but should be well-coordinated with the architect, electrical engineer, and sometimes the controls and automation designer. Equipment

Commissioning

There are many complex industrial systems utilized in your cultivation facility and, after construction is complete, each of them will need to be commissioned to ensure everything is operating correctly. Some of them will need to be commissioned in parallel, and for others successful commissioning may be dependent on other systems. Be sure you understand who will be responsible for start-up and commissioning before purchasing your equipment, and the sequence of starting up the various systems. Some vendors will leave it up to you to find a contractor for installation and commissioning, and very few will offer support throughout the process.

Light it up!

Construction is complete. You’ve finished the long process of building a cannabis cultivation facility, all of the systems are operable, and you’ve handed the facility over to your cultivation team. The financial stress of construction is over. Plants are in, everything will work perfectly right from the jump, and your cultivation team is going to hit it out of the park on day one, right? Not so fast.

The truth is, once plants are in the building, there is still a lot of fine-tuning to be done, in both cultivation processes and the building and support systems themselves, even for very experienced cultivators. That dial-in period might take a few harvests before everything starts firing on all cylinders.

But ask anyone successfully growing on a commercial scale and they will tell you this is all part of the process. That is why it is so important that you work with experienced teams to help keep the process moving each step of the way, as proper planning and expert help are the easiest ways you can avoid costly delays and get growing on schedule.

Brandy Keen is co-founder and senior technical advisor at Surna Cultivation Technologies.