Yes, running a successful indoor gardening operation depends on your horticultural knowledge, tools, the right lighting choice, and chemicals. But there is one more factor here that plays a major role – grow room electrical design.
Electrical wiring in homes with indoor gardens has to be reliable and able to provide the proper output demand. Otherwise, you’re looking at a safety concern.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be an electrician to understand the basics of grow room electrical design. To help you out, we decided to answer the most common questions regarding the electrical side of a grow room.
How Many Amps Does a Grow Room Use?
Amps or amperes is a metric used to measure one of the most important characteristics of an electrical current – the flow rate of electrical power through the electrical wiring. Every electrical system has a unique power output, which is measured in amps.
Since lamps and fans are some of the biggest electrical power consumers, you will have to match the number of lights and fans that operate at the same time to the number of available amps of your electrical system.
A serious indoor horticultural adventure requires more available amps. If you want to make sure that your indoor grow room equipment won’t overload your wiring, you should hire a professional electrician, such as MSC Electrical, to help you with it.
A licensed electrician can also increase the amps of your home’s electrical setup and make more amps available for the grow room.
So, the answer to the “How many amps does a grow room use?” depends on how many watts are needed to power all your lighting solutions and fans.
How Many Watts Does a Grow Room Use?
Watts is another metric related to the electrical current. It represents the power of the electrical current. The wattage you will need for your grow room is equal to the power needed to keep all those lights and fans on. This brings us to the garden size.
The bigger the garden, the higher the wattage. To calculate how many watts you need for a grow room, check the lighting specification and how big of the area it can supply with light.
For instance, if you need 50 watts to supply light to a square foot of the garden, you will need 1,250 watts for 5×5 garden space.
How Many Volts Does a Grow Room Use?
The next thing you should take into consideration is the voltage of the lighting system. Volts and amps requirements are inversely proportional. But, what does this mean?
If a device needs high voltage to operate, it will require significantly fewer amps and vice versa. Optimizing the volts/amps needs ratio can help you optimize your grow room electrical design and power more lighting on the available amperage.
So, how many volts does a grow room use? It can use 120 volts, as well as 240 volts. But it is best to operate a grow room on higher voltage because it enables you to use more lighting systems.
The relation between amps, watts, and volts can certainly cause confusion, especially when you need to take both appliances and grow room lighting into the equation. This is why we advise you to consult with a licensed electrician, such as MSC Electrical, to get the most out of your grow room electrical design!
