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Grow-room control

Know which room is drifting before you lose the flush

Understory watches carbon dioxide, humidity and temperature in every fruiting room and tells you which one is going wrong while there is still time to fix it.

Running in 34 farms across 9 countries
understory.farm/rookery-lane
The problem

A room goes wrong at two in the morning

A stuck damper takes six hours to ruin a flush. Nobody is in the building. The clipboard says everything was fine at six the previous evening, and it was.

Understory pages the on-call number at 01:40, the moment the line leaves the band.

C2 · pink oyster · the night of 8 September
Target band4007001,0001,3001,60018:0021:0000:0003:0005:3000:30 · out of band1,465 ppmC2 · pink oyster
It knows the difference

A pink oyster is not a shiitake

Every species holds a different band, and a generic sensor app alarms on one number for all of them. Pick one to see what Understory holds it to.

03507001,0501,400Blue oyster6001,000Pink oysterLion's maneShiitakeChestnutIncubation

Carbon dioxide, parts per million

Vapour-pressure deficit
0.100.35 kPa
Temperature
1518 °C
Species
Pleurotus ostreatus

Long stems and small caps mean the carbon dioxide has been high for a day, not an hour.

1234One fruiting room, seen from the end
Fitting

Four sensors a room, one afternoon

No rewiring and no controller in the loop. The sensors read; Understory watches and calls you. What you already have keeps running it.

01

Mount four sensors

One at cap height on each of the two longest walls, one at the return, one in the plenum.

02

Set the band

Pick the species. The bands come loaded, and you can move them.

03

Name who to call

One number per room, and a second if the first does not answer inside ten minutes.

Farms already on it

The flush you stop losing pays for the year

+11 pts
Median change in biological efficiency across the first six months
34
Farms, from four-room operations up to twenty-two
1 h 40
Median time from a room leaving its band to somebody standing in it
Biological efficiency, before and afterBeforeAfter
55%65%75%85%95%Kweekhuis Brabant14 rooms+13Coirebank6 rooms+13Ardenne Fungi22 rooms+9Stadskwekerij Noord4 rooms+10Vale End Farm9 rooms+12Hafod Growers11 rooms+12

We lost two pink oyster flushes in a year to the same stuck damper. We have not lost one since, and I stopped driving in at weekends to check.

Marike de Vos · Head cultivator, Kweekhuis Brabant · 14 rooms
Price

Priced per room, not per seat

Everyone on the farm gets a login. You pay for the rooms being watched.

Per room
€39a room, a month

Everything below, on as many rooms as you have.

  • Carbon dioxide, humidity, temperature and vapour-pressure deficit
  • Species bands loaded, and yours on top
  • Calls out when a room leaves its band
  • Lot tracking from spawn run to third flush, kept five years
Sensors
€310a room, once

Four sensors, mounts and the gateway. No contract: stop any month and they stay yours.

  • Vaisala GMP252 carbon dioxide probe
  • Two humidity and temperature sensors, one differential pressure
  • Five-year warranty, calibrated yearly
Before you buy

What growers ask first

Only watch. Understory does not touch your fans, dampers or foggers, which means it cannot make a room worse and it cannot be blamed for a crop. It reads, it judges the reading against the band, and it calls a person. Growers who want control usually already have it and want something independent checking on it.

The gateway keeps recording to its own storage and backfills when the line returns, so the record has no hole in it. Alarms go out over a cellular fallback in the gateway, because an alarm that depends on the same line that just failed is not an alarm.

Yes, per room and per species. The loaded bands are a starting point from published cultivation ranges, not a rule. Most farms move at least one within the first month, usually the vapour-pressure deficit ceiling, because their air handling behaves differently from anyone else's.

Paper tells you what was true when somebody was standing there. Every problem this catches happens when nobody is. The paper record is not wrong, it is just asleep between six in the evening and six in the morning, which is when a damper sticks.

You do. Export the whole history as CSV whenever you want, including after you stop paying. Nothing is aggregated into a benchmark, sold, or used to train anything.

Next step

Start with one room

Fit the sensors in your worst room, the one you already worry about. If it has not told you something you did not know inside a month, send them back.