With the environment your plants are growing in being one of if not THE most important elements to get right, how often you observe that environment can make quite a difference on really understanding what is going on.
If you lived in your grow environment 24/7 you would be completely in tune with what was going on. You’d know how the temperature and humidity changed over the day, you’d know where the hot/cold and dry/damp areas within the environment were. You would also know this because you would move around environment throughout the day.
So when it comes to monitoring your grow environment ideally you want to be taking readings as often as possible and in as many different locations as possible.
In this post I wanted to take a look at the difference it makes depending on often you take readings and plotted them out. The below charts are all from the same time frame in the same environment just with additional points filtered out to reduce the number observed readings.
Chart 1 the data readings are taken every 30 seconds and you can see all of the minor fluctuations from fans etc…
Chart 2 the data readings are taken every 5 min, this still shows a lot of the finer detail
Chart 3 here the data readings are taken every 15 min. At this point you can see we start to loose some of the finer detail which is clearly highlighted in the Stability chart
Chart 4 data points are taken every hour
Chart 5 this is data observed every 4 hours and is probably about how often the average grower is checking in on their grow environment.
Chart 6 data taken every 8 hours
Chart 7 data every 12 hours you are not really getting anything more than this with a standard digital hygrometer
It would be great to hear from everyone, @mastergrowers and @growopowners on recording environmental data associated with your grow environment.
I will be doing a Part 2 taking a look at the difference the number of sensors and where they are placed makes when it comes to getting the full picture.
