With the damp fall weather on its way, it’s time to consider seasonal settings and features in your LCC4 climate control. Botrytis is one of the typical problems that occurs as humidity increases. That’s why the LCC4 has a built-in botrytis function that prevents botrytis and expensive chemical treatments.
As humidity changes with the seasons, it is important to change the humidity settings in your LCC4 climate control. With the correct settings, you can prevent typical problems such as botrytis. Botrytis thrives exceptionally well in areas with high relative humidity. Therefore, the built-in botrytis program will quickly dry out the selected compartments for a set period of time at a chosen time of day, which damages the fungi’s growth conditions.
What is Botrytis?
Botrytis is a well-known challenge in greenhouses. Botrytis is a fungal growth that attacks plants when humidity is high, leaving downy gray/brown spots on buds and flowers.
No chemistry – just climate
In practice, the LCC4’s Botrytis function works by asking your LCC4 climate control to quickly dry out selected sections. When humidity is high, plants cannot evaporate the water from the transpiration process, giving botrytis its heyday in attacking vulnerable buds and flowers.
Treatment of botrytis is a costly chemical affair. To activate the function, you set the desired period – a so-called band – and choose how many percent the humidity should be lowered. By influencing the active climate in the greenhouse and adding a botrytis band, you can avoid treating botrytis with chemistry. Chemistry is known to negatively affect plant growth, for example in the form of slow flowering, low quality and increased waste. You also avoid having to disinfect the greenhouse, which is necessary when you have a fungal infestation.
In order to dry out the compartment, the system causes the temperature to rise. You will experience an increase in consumption when the temperature is raised – for example by 10-20 degrees on the flow temperature – but compared to the cost of the chemicals and the negative effects and time you need to spend on disinfection, for example, it is money well spent. At the same time, you positively impact your sustainability bottom line and environmental efforts.
How to set the Botrytis feature in your LCC4 climate control
You can find the Botrytis function in the Moisture menu in your LCC4 as shown in this video.
- Select department
- Select the Moisture menu
- Select Settings
- Select submenu number 3
Now you can make your desired settings in a botrytis band. The settings are based on your normal settings and you will therefore see that you will be asked to create delays from the normal settings.
For example, if you normally have a relative humidity (RH) of 70% and want to dry out a ward to prevent botrytis, you can lower the RH level in that specific ward for, say, two hours in the afternoon. In this case, you ask the system to create a band with a delay of maximum humidity.
If you want to lower it from your 70% to 65%, you enter a delay of 5%. The system then automatically sets up a series of actions to achieve the desired 65% humidity in the desired period. For example, the system can increase the underheating and control windows and curtains. With this feature, the botrytis tape overrides the normal settings. It gives the culture a “shock” and removes unwanted moisture, thus changing the growth conditions of the unwanted botrytis.
Other important factors for the humidity in your greenhouse
Lack of circulation also greatly affects humidity levels in greenhouses. Therefore, fans and curtains are also important factors when it comes to humidity and climate in general. It is important that the air in the greenhouse is circulated, replaced and evenly distributed. Fans compensate for the temperature in the greenhouse and change the humidity around the plant microclimate.
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