Do I Need to Monitor My Greenhouse?

You grow crops. You sell crops. You don’t want to be limited by your local climate or the fickle weather outside, so you’ve decided to use a greenhouse.

Since greenhouses enable you to control the growing environment, you can grow year-round. Problem: as the seasons change, so do your greenhouse conditions. During colder months, condensation can form on your plants and greenhouse walls, causing higher relative humidity which not only slows transpiration, but can lead to hazardous mold and mildew. If you want to keep your crops safe and healthy in your greenhouse, managing relative humidity is where it starts. Diseases like powdery mildew and Botrytis (gray mold) love high humidity, and spread faster in it.

There’s more than one way to measure relative humidity, from putting a hygrometer on your wall to using a remote monitoring system like Sensaphone. These have merits in their own right, but they are limited: hygrometers are obviously only effective if you’re standing where you can read the screen, while most remote monitoring systems are dependent on an internet connection. For greenhouses and other buildings you need to monitor outside the range of your wifi, you need a system like Smart Barn.

Smart Barn’s one-of-a-kind monitoring system utilizes our partnership with Verizon Wireless, effectively eliminating the need for a connection to the internet. Smart Barn’s sensors (temperature, humidity and more) send data directly to a Verizon, who stores it in the cloud so you can view a report and keep records. Smart Barn will also notify you if the temperature or humidity in your greenhouse exceeds or falls below what you want. Don’t lose any more plants to preventable greenhouse conditions!