Our microgreens grow room setup

We regularly get questions about our setup, so this post gives you an overview of the materials we use.

Like many of you, we often read about materials used in the US, but the same materials are not necessarily easy to find in Europe. We have done a lot of research to find good quality products in Europe, and we’re still looking to find better-priced alternatives for some products when we want to scale up. We’ll keep this post updated as we optimise our grow room in the future.

We do not use affiliate links in this article. All the links are to the products that we bought with our business. We do sell some of the materials we use in our webshop.

We use the Seville Classics 6-tier Steel Shelving. We bought it at Makro.

We love everything about our grow rack, except the price 😂:

• It has 6 tiers, which is more than most racks. When growing vertically, every shelf makes a big difference.
• It’s 123 cm wide and 48 cm deep. This allows us to place 4 trays per shelf.
• This type of rack lets you choose how to configure the different shelves. In regards to microgreens, this allows you to:
  • Create the perfect distance from your lights.
  • Put shelves closer if you only use them for the germinating and blackout phase.
  • Put shelves farther apart if you are creating high stacks of trays.
• The rack is super sturdy.
• The rack has wheels.
• Because the rack is made of steel wires, it’s super easy to attach other components, like your lights or ventilators, to the rack.

The current price of this rack at Makro is €299 (including VAT). We didn’t pay that much when we bought it, but we found this too expensive. That’s why we started looking for alternatives.

After many hours of googling, we decided to go with Danish Trolleys. They have a lot of advantages:

• A Danish Trolley is an industry standard in the horticultural industry. This implies that there are many suppliers of this type of rack.
• The Danish Trolley is modular. You can choose the type of wheels, base, shelves, and poles you want. So you can create the rack that meets your needs best.
• The measures are perfect for placing four trays per shelve (127,5 x 55,5 cm).
• Since it’s used for the horticultural industry, there are flood trays for automated watering that are made to fit perfectly on the shelves.
• It costs about half of the wire racks we could find.

We decided to buy used Danish Trolleys from a Belgian company:
– Used Danish Trolley with a base, poles and 3 shelves
– Used shelves for Danish Trolley

We got them with six levels since we thought we would use them to put microgreens under the lights. However, right now, we’re using them for the germination and blackout phase, and we realised we could use more shelves to use our space better.

You can find the full specifications of our lights on our webshop: Full Spectrum LED Microgreens Grow Light: ~120 cm.

We currently use one light per shelf. We connect up to 5 lights together with daisy chains.

For the lights, we paid attention to the following parameters:

• We use T5 led lights. T5 is the latest generation of fluorescent lamps. They use less energy to generate the same amount of lumen, and they usually have a longer lifespan.
• Our lights are 117,3 cm wide, so one fits perfectly on one shelf.
• One light uses 48 W.
• We use lights that are high in Kelvin (6400 Kelvin). This light comes closest to simulating natural sunlight.
• Our lights generate 110 lm/W. Since our lights use 48W, this means that one light generates 5280 lumens.
• Our lights have a working time of 50000 hours.

As these lights are quite expensive to purchase, we’re going to experiment with using two cheaper lights per shelf. We’ll keep you posted on how that goes!

We currently use one small USB fan per shelf. We use a USB hub to connect them to the plug. We started like this because this is what we saw other growers doing. Since then, we’ve read that these small fans can actually dry out your microgreens and are not necessary on every shelf. That’s why we’re going to experiment with one large fan in our growing room instead of using the individual fans when we scale up.

We use the Meross Smart Wi-Fi Plug with Energy Monitor. This smart plug allows us to monitor our electricity usage to understand our costs better. It also lets us put timers using an app. That way, we don’t need to think about turning the lights on and off.

We use the garland growing and reservoir trays. You can find all the details about them on our webshop:

• Garland 1020 Microgreens Growing Tray With Holes – Shallow Extra Strength
• Garland 1020 Microgreens Reservoir Tray Without Holes – Shallow Extra Strength

We use reusable meshes as a medium, instead of single-use mediums like soil, coconut coir or hemp. You can find all the details about them on our webshop:

• Reusable Microgreen Mesh Grow Medium – Fine Size – 5 pack
• Reusable Microgreen Mesh Grow Medium – Coarse Size – 5 pack

We also wrote an in-depth blog post about our reusable meshes: all about our reusable microgreen mesh grow medium

Some microgreens need weight on them in the germination phase. Depending on the variety, we either use a stack of trays or cobblestones. For the cobblestones, we simply looked on Facebook Marketplace. People always seem to want to get rid of them, so they were free!

We’re lucky that our grow space has a connection to drinking water. In our case, we needed a tap connector to attach a hose to our tap. We created a setup using materials from Gardena, as we like the high quality of their products. Our setup contains the following elements:

• The Premium Tap Connector 26.5 mm (G 3/4″) converts our tap to a connector for a garden hose.
• The Water Smart Flow Meter monitors the amount of water we use. This allows us to monitor our water usage to understand our costs better.
• The Connection Set connects the tap to the reel.
• The 30-meter superflex hose.
• The Hose Connector Set 13 mm (1/2″) – 15 mm (5/8″) for the hose.
• The Classic Hose Reel 50 neatly stores our hose.
• The Comfort Sensitive Plant Sprayer is a nozzle with a misty function so we can delicately water our trays.

We started by using a monitor with a display that showed us the temperature and humidity in our grow room. This monitor has the downside that you need to go to the grow room to check the values. It also doesn’t track the values over time. That’s why we later added another monitor, which gave us these functionalities.

We started growing our microgreens in early spring. When winter came, it quickly became clear that the temperatures in our grow room were dropping way too low. That’s why we decided to invest in an electrical heater.

We currently don’t use a dehumidifier yet. The heater keeps the humidity low. We will probably need a dehumidifier once we turn the heater off in spring.

We use a very sharp flat knife to harvest our microgreens.

I hope this post was helpful to you. We’ll try to keep it up-to-date as we optimise and scale-up. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.