LEDs for Arid Climates

A Bright Idea

Innovations in LED technology are a perfect fit for Arizona’s arid climate.

For many growers, cannabis is an indoor crop. While energy intensive, indoor cultivation offers more consistent yield and appearance. But in hot, arid environments like Arizona, is there a solution for keeping indoor temperatures down while keeping quality high? Cannabis & Tech Today spoke with Brett Stevens, CEO of Fohse Inc., to learn how Arizona growers can utilize LED lighting to lower temperatures and optimize yields.

Cannabis & Tech Today: Why has the cannabis industry been slow to adopt LEDs?

Brett Stevens: The LED manufacturers who had been in the agricultural industry for a long time didn’t take it upon themselves to innovate for cannabis specifically. The problem was that these LEDs were maxing out between like 630800 Watts, and not a lot of photons. So, early adopters said, “Well, yeah, I definitely saved on all my energy bills, and I produced light more efficiently per watt, but my yields went down.” No cannabis producer out there is in the business of saving electricity. They’re in the business of growing and selling weed. And if they could save electricity along the way — great. So that was the uphill battle that LED had to face.

Now, what Fohse can offer the industry is our flagship model, the A3I 1500-watt LED. There’s nothing else like it in the market. By putting out that much power, growers can finally reach the upper thresholds of what cannabis is capable of with some of the highest photosynthetic photon efficacy figures in the market.

C&T Today: What are the advantages to growing with LEDs in a desert environment?

BS: When we were first exploring opportunities in the cannabis space, one of the local facilities where we were working had a problem. They were using 1000W DE HPS fixtures. Many operators switch to night cycles in the desert as their AC systems have to work a little bit less running at night than they do during the day. One evening when nobody was there, the air conditioning lines froze over and stopped working. Cooked the entire crop. Destroyed everything. And of course, there’s no insurance.

So, especially in the desert, you need to have a lighting solution that works with the environment. And when you’re working with high-intensity LEDs like Fohse, we’ve engineered and patented thermal management systems in our fixtures so that you don’t need to rely as much on air conditioning to keep the room cool.

C&T Today: How does LED lighting help manage the temperature of a grow facility?

BS: All but one of Fohse’s models uses 100% passive cooling, so no fans in the fixture itself, which just increases the efficiency. For example, we’ve worked over 16,000 square inches of aircraft-grade aluminum surface area into our A3i model, which effectively takes all the heat generated by the diodes and dissipates it.

Plus, when the plants are growing a lot faster under high-intensity LEDs, they’re putting a lot more moisture into the environment, which allows a cultivator to take advantage of the effects of evaporative cooling. That’s really what’s ideal about deploying LED technology in the Arizona space. ❖