How Important is CO₂ in the Grow Room?

When your grow room’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels are low, your plants experience slower growth rates and reduced yields. To combat this common grow room problem, this blog tells you everything you need to know about when, where, and how plants use CO₂ to grow. It also explains the benefits of supplementing your grow room’s CO₂ to optimise plant growth and health. We’ve included recommended products to help you optimise your grow room’s CO₂ levels quickly and easily!

How do Plants Use CO₂?

• CO₂ For Photosynthesis: Plants use CO₂ in photosynthesis, the process of converting light into chemical energy to produce their own food.
• Photosynthesis For Sugar Production: CO₂ helps synthesize sugars, aiding healthy cell formation and enabling plants to grow faster, larger, and more efficiently.
• No CO₂ = No Growth: Without CO₂, plants cannot photosynthesise or produce the energy they need to survive and thrive.

Where Do Plants Get CO₂ From?

• Outdoor Conditions: Outdoor plants take CO₂ from the air, water from the soil, and sunlight to photosynthesise.
• Indoor Conditions: In a grow room environment, plants may not get enough CO₂ to effectively synthesize sugars for their developmental processes.
• Flower Production: This is especially true for the flowering phase, where CO₂ forces plants to produce greater quantities of bud sites, which increases yields. Therefore, supplementing CO₂ in your grow room prevents slow growth and lacklustre flowering.

If Plants Take CO₂ from their Environment, Does It Need to be Supplemented?

We recommend that you supplement your grow room’s CO₂ levels for the following reasons:

• Low CO₂ Levels: Grow rooms quickly deplete CO₂ as plants absorb it for photosynthesis, potentially limiting growth. Plants grown in controlled environments like grow tents, greenhouses, or sealed rooms benefit significantly from CO₂
• High CO₂ Levels: Equally, CO₂ levels above 2,000 parts per million (ppm) are toxic to plants. Plant growth is optimised with supplementary CO₂ up to 1500 ppm. Anything above this is wasted and potentially dangerous to both plants and humans.
• Optimal CO₂ Levels: Indoor plants require a minimum CO₂ concentration of around 330 ppm to enable them to photosynthesise efficiently, to grow and develop normally.

As well as there being optimal CO₂ concentrations, there’s also optimal time periods for supplementing CO₂ in your grow room.

When should I stop using CO₂ in my grow room?

• To Ensure Quality Flowering: During the last couple of weeks of the flowering phase, it’s recommended to lower CO₂ levels to around 400-800 ppm. This helps to ensure the plant isn’t taking in too much CO₂, which could potentially affect the quality of the flowers or fruit.

Now you know the best times and durations for supplementing your grow room’s CO₂ levels! Next, we’ll introduce you to specialised products to help you control CO₂ for optimised plant health, growth, and yields.

How Do I Control CO₂ Levels in my Grow Room?

Our range of CO₂ controllers, regulators, and burners create the perfect CO₂ rich environment for optimised plant growth:

• CO₂ Control: Monitoring and controlling how much CO₂ is present in your grow room is vital for ensuring your plants’ health, growth rates, and yields.
  >Our Solution: Accurately manage your grow room’s CO₂ levels at any time of day with the Pro-Leaf CO₂ This controller has individual day and night functions which activate via a light sensor, ensuring that your grow room’s CO₂ levels remain consistent around the clock.
• CO₂ Delivery: CO₂ is extremely cold when released from pressurised CO₂ cannisters, freezing the exterior of CO₂ Freezing causes hazardous equipment faults, gas leaks, fire risk, and plant damage.
  Our Solution: Pro-Leaf CO₂ Regulators prevent freezing with their solid brass construction, offering consistent, maintenance-free CO₂ delivery. Connected to a Pro-Leaf CO₂ Controller, this regulator maintains CO₂ gas pressure and flow rate to a desired point.

CO₂ Production: How you produce CO₂ within your grow room depends entirely on your preferences and set-up. Some growers prefer using CO₂ regulators with CO₂ gas canisters, while others prefer using burners with propane tanks.

Our Solution: As well as using a Pro-Leaf CO₂ Regulator with CO₂ gas canisters, Pro-Leaf also has two burners suitable for grow rooms of different sizes. The 4 kW Pro-Leaf Burner is suitable for grow rooms up to 90m². Meanwhile, the 10 kW Pro-Leaf Burner is best for larger growing environments.

These generators connect to propane gas tanks and use a solenoid valve to control the amount of propane that’s released and ignited. The burners ignite when the controller detects low CO₂ levels. Their ‘tip-over’ switch ensures grow room safety and prevents fire risk by automatically cutting the gas supply if the unit falls over.From seed to bud, optimised CO₂ levels boost your plants’ photosynthetic processes and flower production. Used together, Pro-Leaf’s high-performance CO₂ controllers, regulators, and burners deliver unrivalled grow room safety, CO₂ control, reliability, and longevity. Explore our full Pro-Leaf range on the Global Air Supplies website to help you produce the biggest, healthiest crops.