Can greenhouse fogging reduce environmental stress on your greenhouse plants?
The only sure-fire way to make sure that your plants are growing in a stress-free environment is by supplementing them with proper levels of humidity. This statement is even more relevant for greenhouse producers that grow in dryer climates.
A dry climate can be very detrimental to the health of your greenhouse crop because plants that don't receive adequate hydration will end up hydrating their environments themselves. The result is unnecessary stress that can inhibit the production levels of your plants or crop.
Many companies have tried to tackle greenhouse humidification and greenhouse cooling with greenhouse fogging systems that emit fog with high pressure fog nozzles. Though these systems do work to a degree, they can be difficult to control because the fog they emit is usually made up of fog droplets that are inconsistently sized and often too large to fully evaporate. Even if a high pressure system like this is able to maintain the humidity level your plants require, since it produces fog droplets that don't always efficiently evaporate, it can also wet the surfaces on your plants.
As important as humidity is to the health of your plant or crop, a greenhouse fogging system that produces excess wetness while humidifying your air may actually cause more harm than good. This is because harmful fungi and bacteria are more likely to grow and spread on surfaces that remain wet.
An effective way to combat this problem is by installing a low pressure greenhouse fogging system that utilizes a proprietary fogging emitter that emits fog droplets that are less than 5 microns in size. Droplets that are this small will always evaporate before they can gather on surfaces in your greenhouse. Because the fog droplets of this system efficiently evaporate, humidity can be controlled very effectively.
These systems can even be equipped with automatic humidity monitoring equipment so that they can maintain exacting levels of humidity 24 hrs a day 7 days a week without any human involvement. These systems can also very efficiently cool your greenhouse by 20 degrees or more due to the highly evaporative nature of the fog they produce.
A truly unique technology
I have been communicating recently with a greenhouse consultant that resells high pressure misting systems. He had a client that was setting up a 40 acre tomato greenhouse in a very dry climate with an average relative humidity of 30-50%. This client specifically asked this consultant to look for a different kind of misting system because they were not content with the idea of a misting system that would leave all of the surfaces in their greenhouse wet. They were concerned that the excess wetness would make disease prevention very difficult.
I was able to introduce our low pressure greenhouse fogging technology to this consultant. He hasn’t sold our system to his client just yet, but they are definitely very interested. I am fielding questions regularly from them and anticipate that they will move ahead with a system shortly.
I am learning that there is a lot of negative scepticism about greenhouse misting systems which has made selling our “entirely unique” technology more difficult because we unfortunately get lumped in with all the other greenhouse cooling technologies. I will keep you posted on my progress with this consultant in another post soon.
Posted March 15th 2010 at 10:27 am by admin
