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I’m standing here in front of AGronomic IQ Evolution Series units. These units are aimed at an indoor application, so obviously an indoor grow, but indoor equipment placement as well. And that’s the big differentiation between these and the compressor wall. Fundamentally, they’re designed with similar levels of redundancy and control, designed to provide you, the grower, a very similar environment.
The big hallmark of these are they’re dual refrigeration and decks that are entirely redundant, one from another. Meaning that any single failure doesn’t lose control of your room. And that’s really, really important for these Obviously, multiple units can be paired together. And if you’ve got multiple units serving a single space to span control among them, have them work together to control that space.
And we’ll take a quick look through some of the features that make these so important, so special for this space. Starting with here, the compressor deck. You’ve got the flat plate heat exchanger and the water connections. Again, we invite you to watch the dry cooler video, talk a little bit about why we use a water loop for heat rejection.
But that’s on this as well. And again, those two water loops are entirely separate. Any single failure on the refrigeration side there won’t affect the other system. Behind that, you’ve got a three-way modulating valve, and that modulates between the reheat coil and the air conditioning side, that flat plate heat exchanger to change between air conditioning mode and dehumidification mode.
Right on that as a valve, a low ambient control valve that allows us to ensure that we’re able to operate even down to a zero degree Fahrenheit water loop, something that no other water cooled equipment is capable of doing. And it’s unique to us because we know that there are times where there are weird things that happen.
It could be a particularly cold and windy day. And your loop is sub cooling just because it has a dry cooler out there. And so we’ve got built in protections against weird failure modes like that that come from the experience we have in this marketplace. And we’re able to incorporate some of those designs to make your facility more resilient in this case, we’ve got a Copeland as opposed to stage compressor.
This is a 20-ton unit. This is the largest unit today that we build with these two stage compressors. Anything larger than this would be built with a Bitzer scroll paired with an inverter to Valve. All of the coil sets, all the major refrigeration components are in this mechanical vestibule, which means that you can open the doors to that mechanical vestibule.
You can do the maintenance on that system without interrupting your air stream, without interrupting the operation of that unit. You can adjust the valve, for instance, while still having nominal flow through your coil set, allowing you to much more quickly find the sweet spot for that unit. It also means that you don’t have any risk of contamination between your mechanical side and between the air tunnel side.
What’s been the unit around now? We’ll take a look at some of the electronics associated now that we’ve spun this unit. 90 degrees, you can see the dual blowers. You can see the dual contactors dual electrical panels. Again, those redundant features among those two decks, the only thing shared is the one controller. And that controller allows us to stage those two systems and their overall turn down capacity together and allow those two decks to work appropriately to service the room.
Other than in this compartment, you know, other than ease of service ability. Again, the electrical components are isolated from the mechanical or from the refrigeration components, allowing you to do refrigeration work or any refrigeration work that can be done on a live system without having fear of access to the high voltage. A little bit safer to work on.
You’ll also see there’s an electric heater on top. That electric heater, just like all of our stuff is non concurrent with the compressors and that electric heater is really only there as emergency heat. If you were to have a catastrophic compressor failure, but really more likely you’ve got a power outage or something like that in your facility as cold and dark and you need to bring it back up to temperature quickly.
Those electric heaters, because of our capacity for 100% reheat are not used in everyday operation. We’ve got many units out there that are electric heater equipped that just don’t have them, but needing it and not having it is a problem. And so their standard on all of our equipment. Let’s open again and we’ll take a look at the coil set.
So on this side here, you can see the coil set of these two again, completely independent refrigeration decks As the air travels through the machine, it comes from the return our section on my left here. Through these filters. These are standard sized MERV 13 filters again providing excellent filtration for your unit. We’ve got the evaporator coil, micro channel, reheat coil.
And we’ve got the fan you can see behind me here an air proving switch to ensure that in in the event of a fan failure, we’re not trying to heat. We’ve also got the ability to equip these with in outdoor air opening. This one is not but this with these blank off panels behind me would be. You’ll notice that every coil is fully coated so they’re dipped ensuring that there is no exposed metal on any of the coils.
And it means that your condensate recovery will be metal oxide free, allowing you to recover that condensate into your makeup water feed tank and reduce your overall farm water usage. This blue box here is an evaporator bypass damper controller and using this actuator here, we’re able to modulate the amount of air going through the evaporator coil. And it provides a couple of things for us.
It allows us to increase the airflow through the coil when you’re late in your cycle and you’re running your room cold and dry, keeping our suction temperatures up and ensuring that you’ve got continuous performance from the system. It also allows us, though, to modify the airflow, going through that coil and change the sensible heat ratio of that coil.
More air through the coil will do more air conditioning and less dehumidification, whereas if we open the bypass damper will slow the air through the coil down and do more dehumidification with less air conditioning. Again, the ability to very closely tailor the unit’s performance to your room demands. That’s a hallmark of all of the agronomic IQ units and whether you’re going indoor with evolution or outdoor with compressor wall.
Our goal is to give very, very stable room temperatures And each back easy button is what we want to be for you, and that’s achieved throughout our product line. Again, if you’ve got any questions about how we might be able to put equipment in your facility or how our stuff would apply to your building, we’d love to have that conversation with you.
Just a quick update in the spirit of our constant product evolution. This Evolution series will shortly be updated with four compressors. So there will be two compressors in each of the top and bottom deck. And instead of using the Bitzer scroll with the RFD combo, we’re going back to the Copeland two stage compressors on an interlaced evaporator coil, and that’s going to provide us five stages of cooling in every evolution unit.
At least every evolution unit that’s larger than 25 tons and provide much tighter control to your space. More parts commonality with other product that you may have on that, and ultimately just much tighter control. So that’s really what we’re what we’re going for there in driving better control better reliability over the product, more efficient product. And we’re very excited to bring that to you. Expecting that to start shipping late Q2 or early Q3 of 2022.