Rolling Benches Explained: How to add 30 to 50% More Canopy

Rolling benches are one of the simplest ways to get more canopy out of the same room. In this episode, James and Elliott break down exactly how they work, how much extra production they unlock, and what to look for before you buy.

Most commercial licenses are limited by canopy square footage, so every wasted aisle is wasted money. Elliott walks through the fixed-base, sliding-top design, the single moving aisle that replaces four or five fixed ones, the real math on how much canopy you gain, when it makes sense to go vertical with tiered V-track racks, and the lighting, trays, and trellis details that separate a good build from a great one.

If you are planning a build or upgrading an existing room, this is the practical, no-fluff version.

In this episode:
• What you are really optimizing for: canopy size and licensing
• What rolling benches are and how the moving aisle works
• The real numbers on how much extra canopy you gain
• Going vertical with tiered mobile V-track racks and how to ventilate them
• Lighting: HPS vs LED bar lights and light lifters
• Kit vs custom builds, lead times, and crating
• How to spec your bench: widths, height, trays, trellis, and CAD layouts

Planning a room? Green Thumb Depot carries all the major bench and rack brands and can do custom quotes and CAD layouts of your space. Send your room dimensions and the team will help you maximize the canopy.

Shop and get a quote: https://greenthumbdepot.com

Subscribe for more commercial growing breakdowns with James and Elliott. New episodes every week.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey guys, this video is for educational purposes only. Please do not break the law. We are back, another episode of the world famous Growers MBA podcast with James and Elliot. Back to teach you guys a little bit about what we know about the grow space. We're back here with Elliot, probably the most knowledgeable CEA expert in the world. And we're gonna be kind of continuing on with our topic from last week. Last week we were talking about one of our customers who called us up, and they were a brand new DOC. They just got hired at a new farm and they came in and they were just like, dude, I don't I need some help, man. I need to convince these guys. They just they got a whole grow room fulled with a bunch of different tents. And I need to show these guys that that there's a better way of doing things, which you know led us to want to talk about what's the most optimized way of growing things. So if you're interested in that, the most optimized grow setup, check out last week's episode. But in that episode, we you know we were talking about the most optimal grow setup and why you know you don't really want to close things off with so many different tents. And one of the things we we briefly touched on was rolling benches, which I figured would be a really good topic for this week's episode. Something simple, something easy, just a nice little snack of information. And Elliot, I know you got a ton of experience with these. We've sold a lot of rolling benches in the past here. Yeah, let's just start off. I guess I'll just start with an easy question for you, you know, where we can start. And if you know, let's say you just got your license, you're brand new, you're just getting started, and you know, what is it? I mean, you depending on where you are, I guess, it's you either have square footage or the amount of plants, but you want to optimize for it, right? You that's what everything comes down to is optimizing. So, with that in mind, you know, how would you approach things? Well, you know, fill me in here.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Yeah, James, uh absolutely. The vast majority of licenses are based on canopy size. So this is flowering canopy, and you want to do everything that you can to maximize the amount of canopy in your building that you can grow under your license. Some licenses in some states are worded based on plant count. So it's really different depending on which one you fall into. Most are canopy, but if you do have a license that's regulated by plant count, basically you want to grow the biggest plants that you can, right? So if you can only grow X amount of plants, each plant is gonna you want it to be a tree, basically. So you're gonna have a different approach to your layout and how you grow these plants. These are gonna be huge plants, you might you might have them as you know probably as low as possible, maybe on the floor, even grow them to the ceiling, you know, just really maximizing per plant. That's that's definitely the minority of licenses. That's not how most licenses are written. So the majority of the case is you're limited by canopy size. So in this case, you want to maximize the canopy that you can grow in your grow space, as much canopy in the square footage of that room. So one of the easiest ways to do that is simply to use rolling benches. So these are benches that have a base that is fixed to the floor, and the top will slide back and forth, you know, anywhere from let's say 10 to 18 inches in either direction. So if you can imagine many rows of these benches and they're lined up so that the sides are butting up to each other, and you can basically fill the entire room minus a three-foot walkway for your ADA compliant aisle space, right? You can fill the entire room with canopy. And then because each bench rolls side to side, you can roll these two benches like that, and now you have your aisle there, and then when you need to get over here, you know, then you spread these two benches out, if that makes sense. So the aisle moves to wherever you need it to uh be in between. And instead of having, you know, if you have like five benches, you're gonna have at least four aisles. You know, if you didn't have rolling benches, with rolling benches, it doesn't matter how many benches you have, you only need one aisle, right? And so that drastically increases your canopy square footage inside your flowering room, and it has a more profound effect the larger that the room is, because you only need that one aisle. It doesn't matter how big the room is. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Okay, that's super interesting, Elliot. So basically, what it does, these rolling benches, because in these situations, these grow rooms and stuff, you really are trying to optimize every single inch of space, right? And so essentially these rolling benches make it so that you can have one row at the time at a time, but every single other row is gonna be taken up because you can just roll those over. And that means that you're getting the most optimized space you could possibly get, where you're still gonna be able to have the ability to walk through these different rows every now and then. And if you need to go to a row that's currently closed, you just open it up and you can walk through there. You need to go in there and do some investigation, do some care for your plants, whatever it is, you can do it that way. Typically, on average, like how much extra canopy space does rolling benches get you?

SPEAKER_01 5:00

It really does depend on the square footage of your room. So, you know, if let's say you had a room and you had three benches, so you're gonna have one against each wall and then you have one in the middle, okay? So you would need two aisles, right? So you need an aisle, if you have that center bench, you need an aisle on one side and then an aisle on the other side. So in that case, you have two aisles and you have three benches. If you used rolling benches, you could make approximately make that four benches with one aisle. So you're increasing it by one-third, if you will. That would be like kind of the minimum size, right? But if you imagine a larger room and let's say you had 10 benches, right? So if you had to have an aisle in between each of those, right, it would actually be like nine aisles because you have the walls and whatever. So if you did rolling benches in that situation versus non-rolling benches, it would almost double your square footage in that room, right? And because all of the equipment and the lights and everything in there is costly, you you just don't want wasted space. And you know, paying the mortgage or paying the rent on the facility, that's based on square footage. So you really want this industry is you live and die by margins, right? It's a it's a tough business. You have to optimize everything. So when you get to those larger rooms, especially, but even with the smaller rooms, you always want to do rolling benches. If you can at all possibly afford it, it's gonna definitely pay for itself with, you know, even a single flip.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

And for the people that are still kind of on the fence here, who, you know, what I guess what are they typically doing if they're not if they don't have rolling benches, they just have all this wasted space?

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Yeah, and you know, some people are, you know, maybe they just got their license or they're working towards it and they don't have the funds to spend on the rolling benches, so they're trying to get that first run in and generate some revenue, and then they'll they'll buy some other stuff, equipment to optimize. And that's fine. We all got to start somewhere. But the recommendation is as soon as you can afford it, get the rolling benches, it's gonna pay for itself on that next run. It really will. You know, a lot of time and effort and and whatnot is spent on you know getting the perfect light and you know, the perfect strains, and that's great. It was very important, but again, when it comes to margins, and this is definitely gonna increase your ROI based on increasing your canopy square footage ratio, the canopy ratio versus the actual floor, you know, the floor plan ratio.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

Yeah, and I think that is kind of a really important topic that you just a really important note that you just mentioned there, which is basically, you know, a lot of people might be like, hey, how do I get like the highest terpene percentage, or how do I like make the dankest weed? And in reality, you know, those are good things to aim for and good things to optimize for, but really like just optimize your space, you know, increase your output by like you know, 30 to 50 percent, depending on how big your room is, you know. If you can have a much bigger canopy size, like it's a clear win, you know.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

So yeah, it's and and and it really every everything is important. I I hate to say it, but it's like you know, if you don't if you don't have really good terpenes, people aren't gonna want to buy your product. Now you're sitting on product, and if and if it goes past its shelf life, now you've lost that whole run. So you can't scrimp on that, but you know, if you don't maximize your square footage of canopy, then your margins are gonna be killed by that. And then, you know, you also should be adding under canopy lights that can increase your yield 30-35%. So all of these things are extremely important. CO2 augmentation, all sorts of things. But it's important to get each one of them right because if you're not getting them all of these variables right, the guy down the street is, and he's gonna be the one that puts you out of business. So you really got to make sure that we get all of these things. Just dialed in.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

So for the hyper optimizers out there, they've already got their rolling benches, they've taken up every inch of the vertical space they possibly can, but they've still got some extra canopy square footage left in their license with their license. You know, what are these hyper optimizers to do? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 9:13

If you have enough head space, meaning height in your warehouse, your facility, grow vertical, just go upwards. So once you've gotten the side to side with uh, you know, the square footage on a single plane, if you're looking for more than canopy in that same area, you can go vertical. So in this case, the product that you're looking for is a tiered mobile, you know, V-track is what they will call them. They run, they they move like the rolling benches, but whereas the rolling benches have a fixed base and the top slides side by side, so you get that aisle space, the tiered racks are going to actually the entire rack is going to move. So it's kind of like similar to a pallet rack, right, that you see in Home Depot, but optimized for growing, much lighter weight, and they're they're mobile. The entire racks will move, and they're they they are on these V tracks so that they're guided so that they are very smooth and just go back and forth. And in that case, you can do the exact same thing, but you're not doing it on a single horizontal plane. You have two or planes stacked on top of each other. Now, this is not for your beginning grower, okay? It this requires a lot of optimization. The racks themselves are more expensive. You're gonna be doubling up on your lights and everything like that.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

So for the growers that have decided to try going vertical, you know, it's clearly not gonna be for everybody. It's something that's quite difficult. What are some issues that people can run into if and that they should be aware of before they decide to start investing in going vertical?

SPEAKER_01 10:40

But the tricky part is really about not creating microclimates. Um, you know, when you have everything on a single plane, it's a lot easier to avoid the microclimates. But, you know, the basic concept is right, heat rises, right? So when you have two planes in the same room and one's above the other, you know that top plane is gonna get hotter than the bottom one. And you've got to be able to deal with that discrepancy because you really don't want different microclimates, you want to even it out as possible as much as possible. So there are things you can do. A lot of these tiered racks will come with options, or you can buy them after the fact for ventilation. They have you know fans on like these inline fans on the ends of the racks, and then they have what we call socks that are affixed to that fan, and they have holes in them. So you can run multiple socks underneath the canopy that are attached to blowers that blow fresh air and CO2 augmented air up through the canopy, and that can work really well, you know, but it will never be as easy as a single level with rolling benches. But when you're really when you get to that level and you're looking to expand, it's well worth it. It does take a little bit more knowledge and care for sure. All right.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

So, what type of lighting should people be looking at when they're looking at rolling benches versus more of these vertical rack options?

SPEAKER_01 12:03

Yeah, no, that's a great question, James. For rolling benches, you're really you you can use any options that are out there. It really depends more upon the healing, ceiling height of your warehouse, right? Your facility. So if you have high enough ceilings and you don't have to worry about heat generation so much, you can go with, you know, standard HID type fixtures like HPS or you know, I not many folks are using metal halide for veg anymore, but you could consider something like that. You can also use LEDs that are designed to be a one-to-one swap out for an HPS. So these are very powerful LEDs that are designed to be essentially hung at the exact same height, you know, high above your plants, and they're so powerful that works fine and they still get the enough energy to your plants for good harvest. The if you have a limitation on your ceiling height, then you can go with LEDs that are designed like your bar lighting. So these are ones that are more spread out, and they're pretty much the more common fixture that you see in most commercial grows nowadays, and they're kept as close to the plants as possible because they don't have the same power as the HPS or the one-to-one swap out LEDs. So they're hung much lower. A lot of times they're on what we call light lifters, so you can change the heights of them as the plants progress through their phases and they get taller. That way you can keep them right above the canopy as the plants get older and get larger. Now, when it comes to tiered racks, you're not gonna do HPS and you're not gonna do the one-to-one LEDs, the real powerful ones. You're you have to do bar lighting. There's just there isn't the space to do anything else because those lights are gonna be right above your canopy. So when you're doing tiered racking, you're definitely gonna want to do smaller plants, sea of green or scrog techniques, screen of green. Basically, you're gonna keep that canopy a couple feet, you know. It all depends on how tight your tiers are, but you're gonna keep that canopy very low. And with the rolling benches, you have more options. It does depend on the ceiling height, but you know, if you have high ceilings, you can grow a lot larger plants. So, again, you know, it really does depend on the conditions in your facility.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

Yeah, excellent information. And I guess my final question is these are huge pieces of equipment, depending on how big your facility size is. You know, these are big pieces, big, heavy pieces of equipment. The setup, it can be there could be a lot. So typically, how do these arrive? How are they delivered? What does it come with? And how difficult is it for you to for people to set up? You know, do they need to hire a separate construction company to come out and set it up, or is this something that can be done by the growers, by the DOCs?

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Ah, yeah, no, that's a great question. In general, there's two general categories for rolling benches. There's going to be your what I call kit-based solutions, and then there's going to be custom solutions. The pricing on them isn't too different, and the quality on the custom solutions is generally much more, it's sturdier, and I generally recommend those. The main difference is that when you get a custom built solution, you can't get it right away. You gotta give them the specs, the metal fabricators punch it out. It can take you know anywhere from four to eight weeks to get them built, and then they're delivered in crates. When you go with a kit-based solution, it a lot of times they're in stock, and you can get them shipped out, you know, as soon as you pay for them, essentially. So for a lot of people, time is of the essence. They may want to go with a kit. Hopefully, you've planned ahead and you can go with a custom solution, which I think is gonna, in the end, be much more desirable for a commercial operation. So that's your two main options. Now, when what are the different options in each of it within each of those options? So you're gonna go with certain widths, right? The standard width is gonna be four foot or five foot, and those I would you can't really get them much wider than that. I think you might be able to do six or something, but then you're gonna have trouble getting to the center of the plants. So most people use four-foot benches, four-foot widths for their rolling benches. They're depending on the layout of the room, you might have some or all that are five foot just to optimize the space. It really comes down to the dimensions of the room. So, first thing is when you're doing rolling benches, you really want to have drawings of the rooms that you're putting these in. Because if you get us drawings, we can work with the manufacturer and we'll get you CAD AutoCAD layouts of each of your rooms where they have tweaked it perfectly so that you're gonna maximize that canopy. If you just tell me or tell us the dimensions that you want, that's fine if you're confident in that, but you might be missing out on some square footage. So that's a little no, probably should have said that earlier. But but anyway, so you want to determine the width, the height is really important. If you're gonna be growing larger plants and you have limited ceiling space, you're definitely gonna want to keep those rolling benches as low as possible. Typically, they're not gonna go much lower than like 16 inches. Now, just keep in mind if you're on a chair or something and you want to get your legs underneath there, you you'd want it higher than 16 inches. So that's some things to think about. Now, these rolling benches they typically come standard with ultra-low stall plast trays. So these are your trays that catch your irrigation, you know, and funnel it out to the waist. I'm assuming that most people who are watching this are doing top-down drain to waste. You know, it's really not a tray to hold water, it's more like the tray under your potted plants that just catch the extra flow through and funnel it to your you know, to your drain. So they come, they typically come with the the trays and they come with some limited plumbing fixtures, so you can attach that drain. And then optionally, you can get trellis supports. I would never recommend not using the trellis, like always get the trellis supports. You're gonna need the trellis anyway. And you know, these are just essentially like metal poles that you can hang the plastic trellis on so that when your beautiful ladies are getting laden down with huge colas, they're not gonna break off. You know, they're gonna be supported. Let's see, what else do they come with? About it for the options. Obviously, the length is an option, right? Now, when you do order the custom ones, these typically come in pretty large crates. So if you don't have a forklift, you're probably gonna need to rent one. This is not something that you can really use a lift gate typically to get off the truck, so just keep that in mind. And that could be another reason why you might go with a kit-based approach, is that it is usually in a box that can be raised and lowered with a lift gate. But I wouldn't make a decision between a kit-based and a custom just because you don't have a forklift. Go rent the forklift, it's worth it. Now, when it comes to the tiered racking, these these have some options too. You have the width, you know, the trays are the same. They don't come with the trellis supports because you use the tiered rack itself. You can hook the uh the trellis onto that, so you don't need to worry about the trellis supports. The main options for the tiered racking is there's the Cadillac, which are going to be the ones that you know, they're they have uh cranks and a pulley system so that you just stand at the end, and these things could be 60 feet long, and you just crank it, and it the whole thing slides over, easy peasy, not a lot of effort because there's gears in there, so you get leverage. But if you don't have the money for that, you can go with a lower cost option, which is a really lightweight rack. You probably wouldn't want to do it as long of a run with these, but you're actually pushing them back and forth. So there's no gears, there's no crank, but if you keep them 16 feet or somewhere around there, you shouldn't have too much effort to just push them back and forth. You can save some money that way. And there are likewise on the rolling bench side, there are different brands. We work with all the manufacturers, and you can get ones that are a little bit nicer for a little bit more money, and you can go a little bit more cheaply. But in general, the pricing doesn't matter too much. So I would tend to, it's not that big of a difference. I would tend to just go with the highest quality rolling benches that when you go and make your purchase, you're not really saving much to try to save a buck or two. And who wants to deal with an inferior quality?

SPEAKER_00 20:24

As always, Elliot, a thorough and complete answer. And uh yeah, I feel like we really covered a lot today with the rolling benches. So if you guys still have questions, I don't know what else could be asked, but if you guys still have any questions about these, uh we pretty much carry all the big brands. We can do custom quotes for you guys. We can do, like Elliot mentioned earlier, the kits. Basically, anything. If this sounds like something you guys are interested, give us a call. We'll talk you through it, and we can set you guys up with you know some of the best prices on the market. As always, Elliot, I appreciate you taking the time to help walk me through it and anybody else that might be curious about the topic. And we'll be back next week, maybe to talk about D hues, the big, the big one, d hues. That that's a big conversation, and there's a lot of technical aspects of that. So looking forward to that one. So, anyways, yeah. So, anyways, Elliot, thank you so much, and I'll talk to you later. Yeah, thanks.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Glad to be here, James. We'll see you next week.