Smart sensors for climate control of insect farm

Problem

As the demand for sustainable protein sources increase, entrepreneurs are turning to insect farming as an innovative and eco-friendly solution. Insect farms can produce large amounts of protein-rich insects such as crickets, mealworms, and black soldier flies using minimal resources and generating minimal waste. A new insect farming company realized that to ensure optimal growth and quality of the insects, it’s crucial to maintain a stable and suitable environment inside the farm. Normally investing in a classical HVAC system is cumbersome, complex and, not least, expensive for a newly started company. Climate control is also substantial part of the operational cost so the company needed a more flexible solution that could be adjusted and tuned to the continues stream of new learnings in the emerging business.

Solution

Nubis has much experience in low-cost climate control and ways to optimize energy use. After a short study, engineers at Nubis discovered that most insects thrive best in a temperature range from 25-32°C with relative humidity between 50-80% depending on life stage, insect type and 24-hour cycle. Keeping within the specification is crucial for the insects’ growth as well as for keeping harmful molds, bacteria and pests at bay. By designing the system, without the prohibitive cost of air conditioning, the system needed to constantly predict outside temperatures and humidity, use data to enable humidifiers, and outside fans, and correlate with heat pump data. In the end, Nubis designed from scratch a series of low-cost devices, using electronics, 3D printing, high precision sensors, and solid-state relays, a mesh network of small electrical devices spread out inside and outside their facility, connected on a RS-485 bus to an Internet gateway. Devices on the mesh ran a robust self-contained regulation algorithm, communicating information between the devices, feeding in information from Internet weather sites, storing historical data on a database in the Cloud, executing an optimization algorithm to save cost and keeping the climate as perfect as possible. In addition, Nubis procured the right fans, heaters, humidifiers, and carried out the installation so everything would work efficient and seamlessly with the system.

Conclusion

The insect farm realized the importance of a well-designed climate control system early on, that enabled them to make the right compromises on climate and cost it. Further, the very flexible system could quickly be installed, tuned, moved around, added to and easily studied. After one month a first version of the system was installed, including comprehensive Cloud based graph dashboards and control panels, and the subsequent week the climate was controlled within a decimal place.

By using smart inexpensive sensors, energy-efficient fans and heating systems, the system performed extremely well, saving significant operational cost compared to traditional HVAC systems.