A Quick Guide to Increased Demands from Under Canopy Lighting

We designed Faven lights to integrate easily into any grow, but you’ll still need to adjust a few things after installing under canopy lights:

• Increased light means the plants will have an increased need for water and food,
• You'll need to compensate for increased humidity,
• And there's the added task of cleaning and stacking the lights between runs.

None of these changes require much extra labor or significant adjustments to your workflow, but you need to pay attention to them as you integrate UCLs into your facility.
This is a general guideline. Every grow is different, and you'll develop your best practices with some time, but these guidelines will be a good place to start.

Food and Water Levels

Adding under canopy lighting will place an increased demand on your plants. You will need to meet that demand with more resources.
Recommended parameters for increased demands:

• About 10%-15% more water volume is standard
• About 10% more EC, only needed if plants show signs of deficiency

Managing Humidity Increase

With increased water volume and greater biomass, more transpiration will occur, leading to higher humidity levels. The obvious solution is to increase your dehumidifying capacity. However, we've found that reducing your plant count is also effective (and helps promote airflow in the lower canopy).
Going from four rows of plants down to three rows of plants per table has shown to be plenty of compensation without needing to add dehumidification capacity. If you are already at three rows of plants, consider your plant count per 4’x4’ or 4’x5’ of bench space. Our general rule of thumb for 4x4 space is around 9 plants on single-tier and 12 plants on multi-tier setups.

Less Labor, but New Labor

Overall, under canopy lights will decrease labor time and requirements thanks to the reduced need to skirt or under-clear your plants. However, the added tasks are cleaning, clearing, and stacking the lights after harvest.

We timed four workers removing 160 UCLs and then cleaning and stacking them in less than 60 minutes. So there is not much time added to the typical process of breaking down a room post-harvest.
We recommend removing lights after harvest is complete. This makes it easy to unclip and remove lights from the room without working around plants, trellis, and substrates.

Know Your Own Grow

Every strain reacts differently, so the most important thing is to pay attention. We always recommend that people start Faven lights out at a low intensity and slowly increase them over the first few weeks.
As you increase intensity, watch for added plant stress. If you see any added stress, reduce the light intensity for a few days to let the plants rebound. If you incrementally increase intensity by 5%-10% every other day, you won't see much plant stress. You're the expert on your plants and facility. As long as you pay attention, no one will know how to adjust your levels better than you.