Canadian IT specialist Climate Control Systems Inc has launched its new Climate Manager product, a climate control computer 25 years in the making.

The concept was born in an age before computers had taken over our lives and growers generally controlled the microclimate of a greenhouse manually and with a thermometer. CCS was one of the first firms to supply computerised automation equipment and technology to control the climate for greenhouse hydroponic crops in the Leamington area of Canada.

"The secret is in the technology. We’re introducing the latest in technology to the agriculture sector to keep them going for another 25 years but this time it’s Canadian.” said Eric Labbate, the CCS president.

The product is based on hardware and software components more familiar to the automotive and aerospace industry. The main PC talks to a plug-in computer brain inside each control panel. It can talk over an Ethernet network to multiple plug-in computers located throughout the greenhouse.

Rather than one, central system, Climate Manager works with multi computers, processing many instructions per second. This computing power gives a grower the ability to access their climate computer with a web browser and log on from a remote computer or Black Berry™ device to check climatic conditions at their greenhouse operation and make changes in real-time.

Since 1985, CCS has been supplying greenhouse automation equipment to control the climate and irrigation for greenhouse hydroponics crops, drip Fertigation and closed looped water recycling. To date, they have designed hardware and software control programs for vegetable, flower and nursery crops.

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