ANSWERS — HOW IT WORKS

What equipment will I add beyond the greenhouse?

We sell the structure, its coverings, doors, ventilation, and book add-ons — and nothing else on this page. Benches, fertigation, CO2, grow lights, and backup power come from specialist suppliers. Here is what each one does, the honest numbers around it, and how to plan the building so it all bolts in.

AMERICAN ROOTS — ANSWERED BY THE PEOPLE WHO BUILD IT · UPDATED JULY 2026

Our book prices the building. The fit-out comes from other suppliers.

Everything in the build tool — frame, coverings, endwalls, doors, active ventilation, light dep, roof shading, bug screens — is ours, priced to the dollar. The five systems below are not: they come from bench fabricators, irrigation houses, lighting manufacturers, gas suppliers, and electrical contractors. We will not pretend to sell them, and we will not invent prices for them. What we do is design the structure they mount into and help you sequence the plan.

Rolling benches recover the floor you already paid for.

Fixed benches dedicate an aisle to every row; rolling benches slide on rails so only one aisle is open at a time. Bench vendors put the recovered growing area at roughly 20 to 30% (the benchmark the largest greenhouse manufacturers publish — their number, not ours). Tops come solid, mesh, or as ebb-and-flow flood trays that double as the irrigation surface, in standard 4 and 5 ft widths. Spec corrosion-resistant steel and roll-locks — fertigation salts plus humidity are hard on cheap hardware.

Water plus nutrients, dosed to pH and EC instead of by hand.

Fertigation systems deliver water and dissolved nutrients through drip or flood lines, run by a dosing controller holding your pH and EC setpoints. Simple proportional injectors are cheaper; sensor-feedback controllers read actual EC and pH and self-correct, which drifts less. If your benches are flood trays, the tray is the irrigation surface — decide benches and fertigation together, with one supplier conversation informing the other.

Light is a DLI problem, an electrical problem, and a climate problem at once.

Supplemental fixtures top up the sun so the canopy hits its target Daily Light Integral through winter and cloud. LED runs roughly 40 to 50% less electricity than HPS for the same canopy light — but fixtures are the biggest single electrical load in the building, and LEDs change leaf temperature and VPD enough to force an irrigation re-tune. The full comparison: LED or HPS.

CO2 pays only in a room that is already dialed in.

Enrichment to 800–1,000 ppm can raise cannabis yields roughly 10 to 25% (Cannabis Business Times) — but only when light, water, nutrients, and temperature are already right, and only in a room sealed enough not to vent the gas away. Delivery is bottled CO2 or burners (which add heat and humidity), dosed by the climate controller. CO2 is also an asphyxiation hazard at high concentrations, so monitoring and alarms belong in any plan.

The generator is sized from the loads you just specced.

One outage takes down lights, climate, and irrigation at the same moment, and even a one-hour brownout can devastate a crop when the climate slips out of range. Generators are sized to the simultaneous draw of the critical loads — lighting, HVAC, dehumidification, pumps — with UPS coverage for controls and security that cannot ride a start-up delay. That total only exists once the rest of the fit-out is specced, which is why your electrical contractor prices it last.