Designing a cannabis cultivation room with 5ft wide tables compared to 4ft wide tables can offer several advantages, particularly in cost, efficiency, and overall yield.

Here are some key benefits:

1. Reduced Installation Costs

  • Fewer Tables, Fewer Uprights, Fewer Driveboxes: Using 5ft wide tables instead of 4ft wide tables means you need fewer tables to cover the same area. This translates to fewer frames and supports, reducing installation labor and hardware costs.
  • Simplified Layout: A layout with fewer, larger tables can be simpler to design and implement, potentially reducing the time and effort required for installation. A design utilizing 5ft wide tables will also have fewer moving parts and lower maintenance costs over time.

2. Reduced Materials/Square Foot Cost

  • Less Total Materials: With larger tables to cover the same or more square feet the cost per/sf goes down. Often you can use fewer rows to achieve the same canopy goals which can result in the need for less access decking, mounting brackets, and integrated airflow solutions. This reduction in material use leads to cost savings.
  • Lower cost of ownership: less tables and less drive boxes ultimately means a lower investment cost to maintain the system. It could be one less row/drive box to maintain or fewer trays to replace with a 5ft wide tables than with 4ft wide tables.

3. Better Room Utilization

  • Optimized Space Usage: Larger tables can reduce the number of aisles needed, as each table covers a greater area. This means more of the room’s total area is used for growing plants rather than for aisles, leading to better space utilization and efficiency of the facility as a whole..
  • Optimized Mobile Aisle Space:  Using a combination of 4ft and 5ft wide tables creates the opportunity to find the optimal mobile aisle width without compromising workflow. The use of wider tables can give you flexibility in designing a mobile aisle that is not too small nor too wide, which means more room is dedicated to the cultivation area rather than pathways.

4. Increased Canopy Area

  • Greater Plant Density: With better space utilization and fewer aisles, a larger proportion of the room can be dedicated to the plant canopy. This results in more plants per square foot of the cultivation area and higher yield.
  • Enhanced Light Utilization: Larger tables can create an opportunity to introduce new, improved or higher-powered lighting options, better aligning the light distribution, ensuring that more plants receive optimal light, enhancing their growth and potentially increasing the overall yield per square foot.

5. Improved Operational Efficiency

  • Easier Maintenance: With larger tables, maintenance tasks such as watering, pruning, applying IPM, and harvesting can be more efficient. Workers can tend to more plants from a single location, reducing time and effort.
  • Streamlined Workflow: A more open layout with fewer tables can make it easier to move around the room, easier to load in plants, and easier to harvest, improving the workflow and reducing the time spent navigating between tables.

6. Potential for Advanced Systems Integration

  • Enhanced Irrigation and Nutrient Delivery: Larger tables may facilitate more efficient integration of irrigation and nutrient delivery systems as less plumbing is needed to serve the same or larger amounts of canopy in the same room.
  • Uniform Environmental Control: Managing environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels can be more straightforward with fewer, larger tables. More interstitial space for airflow and less infrastructure for mechanical solutions lead to a more uniform growing environment with a lower capex.

Enhancing Efficiency with Mixed-Width Tables:

Switching from 4ft wide tables to 5ft wide tables or using a combination of 4ft and 5ft wide tables in a cannabis cultivation room can provide significant benefits, including reduced installation and material costs, better space utilization, increased canopy area, improved operational efficiency, and the potential for advanced systems integration. These advantages can lead to higher yields, better plant health, and overall cost savings, making the cultivation process more profitable and sustainable.

Let’s use a 25x50sf room as an example and explore some layout options:

25x50ft room, using only 4ft wide tables its 909 canopy sf.

With only 5ft wide tables and 4 rows, it is also 909 SF. (Image below)

But it is one less row, one less drive box, lower capex in materials, and the fastest installation.

One row of 5ft tables 5 rows single tier.

For a total of 954 canopy sf 5 rows. (Image above)

Here is another example with a room that is 35ft by 50ft. This time 4ft wide only racks get you 7 rows and 1,272 canopy sf. (Image below)

With only 5ft wide tables you get 1363 canopy sf. (Image below)

And finally, by mixing 4ft and 5ft wide tables you optimize the space and get 1409 canopy sf. (Image below)

4ft = good
5ft = better
4ft and 5ft = best

By choosing the optimized layout you gain 137 canopy square feet.

So why do we care about 137 canopy square feet?

Let’s assume we harvest 65grams/sf

137 x 65grams = 8,905 grams / 454 = 19.6lbs

19.6lbs x $1,200 = $23,537 more revenue every harvest

5 harvests a year  = $117,687 more revenue each year

If you have 5 rooms like this it is $588,436 more top-line revenue each year.

Let’s go further and see what $588,436 is in a comparative sense: 

  1. Home Purchase: equivalent to the cost of 1.57 median homes in the U.S.
  2. Annual Salary: equivalent to about 10.7 years of an average U.S. annual salary
  3. Luxury Car Purchase: approximately equivalent to the cost of nearly 7 Tesla Model S cars.
  4. College Education: roughly equivalent to covering the full four-year tuition for nearly 3 students at a private college.
  5. Vacation Comparison: equivalent to the cost of almost 59 luxury 2-week vacations in Europe.
  6. High-End Wedding:  roughly equivalent to the cost of nearly 17 high-end weddings.
  7. Luxury Watch Purchase: approximately 58 Rolex watches.

Conclusion

Switching from 4ft wide tables to 5ft wide tables, or utilizing a combination of both in your cannabis cultivation room, offers substantial benefits. These include reduced installation and material costs, optimized space utilization, increased canopy area, improved operational efficiency, and the potential for advanced systems integration. The transition to wider tables can lead to higher yields, better plant health, and significant cost savings, ultimately making your cultivation process more profitable and sustainable. By carefully planning your table layout, you can maximize the productive capacity of your cultivation space, resulting in greater revenue and a more efficient operation.