Automating and Securing your Indoor Grow Room using Z-Wave Home Automation Technology
by Eric McIntyre, TechnologyGarden.net
Published 10-5-2009

Tending and caring for your Hydroponic, Aeroponic or traditional indoor garden can be relaxing and calming for some , but for many it’s about as much fun as a trip to the dentist.  Indoor gardening requires lighting and watering at certain intervals as with any garden but in most cases more frequently.  Hydroponic and Aeroponic gardening indoors requires water, air pumps, temperature control as well.  Watering, lighting, checking heaters, water levels and just keeping an eye on your garden can be quite time consuming, especially if your garden is tucked in a closet or down in the basement.

Automating as much as you can in your garden can save you time and also give you peace of mind.  Most everyone starts by putting a few mechanical timers on their lights and that’s about the extent of automation in their garden.  We decided to go a bit further and implemented a Z-Wave Home Automation controller and modules to not only automate, but monitor the garden as well.  The best part is adding this Z-Wave Automation system into your indoor garden is both inexpensive and easy!

The Heart of the system – Vera

We decided to use a newer home automation technology called Z-Wave, and selected the Vera system to use for control.  Vera is a Z-Wave Home Automation gateway/controller that works with the popular Z-Wave home automation protocol.  Along with Vera we used several different Z-Wave devices  and IP cameras to monitor and control our indoor grow room.   Yes, we said MONITOR and CONTROL and we can do all of this from anywhere! This means we can monitor everything from lighting, temperature, fans and other electronics, and even detect leaks and water levels in our reservoirs.

Using Vera we can also turn on and off devices with easy-to-use internal timers.  Gone are the days of bulky wall timers that are cumbersome to setup.  With the Vera Z-Wave controller you get unlimited timers that you can add/suspend and delete from anywhere with an Internet connection.  We can also login and turn devices on/off and enable scenes such as “flowering light”, fill reservoir” or “lower PH”.  These scenes can do anything like change lighting from an 18-hour cycle to a 12-hour cycle for flowering, or enable a pump from your main reservoir that turns on for 2 min to top off your aeroponic reservoir.  The possibilities are endless with Vera and the right Z-Wave devices! Vera simply allows tending and watching over our garden easier and gives peace of mind when we are traveling for work or on vacation.   We watch over our garden remotely by monitoring sensors and temperature levels and even viewing live video from our cell phone.

Automating Lighting, Pump, Fans, Heaters

The first thing we did with Vera was purchase a few heavy-duty Z-Wave modules designed for outdoor use.  These GE outdoor modules can take more wattage than other modules and are non-dimmable.  We wanted a module that could handle our Hydrofarm 1000 Watt Grow-Light and take the high humidity and harsh environment of our grow room.   In order to use the modules, we had to add them to the Z-Wave network so Vera knows about them.

Adding a Z-Wave device to the Vera network is simple, you remove Vera’s USB Z-Wave dongle and press the button on it.  You then plug in the Z-Wave device you wish to add and then press the ON/Configure button.  This relays the devices info into the USB Z-Wave dongle.  Add the USB dongle back into Vera and bam – your device shows up within a minute or two allowing you to assign it to a room of desired and name the device, in this case we called it “grow light”

Now that we have the device added, we the create a scene in Vera and add a timer into that Scene. We entered in a scene called “Grow Light 18 hour” since we wanted to run the Hydrofarm 1000 Watt Grow-Light for 18 hours a day for vigorous growth and a 6 hour rest period in darkness.  We can set the virtual timer in Vera to do almost anything at any time any day of the week.  It’s flexibility is simply amazing, and if you desire, you can even set the timer based on Sunrise and Sunset which is automatically updated in Vera – very cool! Once the timer is set, it’s done.  You can login anytime from a web browser or cell phone to check the status of the light module or actually turn it off and on.

We also connected some of our 500 GPH water pumps into a GE  Z-wave Outdoor lighting module so we can turn on and off the pumps remotely, and if we were using an EBB & Flow system, we could turn on the pumps quickly to flood, and disable them for a determined amount of time.  Vera sure does beat using mechanical timers on everything!

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