VentPlus for mushroom growers
Automatic carbon dioxide control for oyster, button,
milky and shiitake mushrooms
No crop is as sensitive to carbon dioxide as mushrooms. Unlike green plants, mushrooms produce CO2 as they respire, so in a closed crop room the level climbs fast — and once it sits too high, you see it in the harvest: long thin stems, small caps and pins that never form. A VentPlus CO2 monitor & controller reads the air continuously and runs your exhaust or fresh-air fan automatically to hold the exact ppm each stage needs.
Carbon dioxide is the single biggest lever over mushroom morphology. During spawn run, a rich CO2 atmosphere actually helps the mycelium colonise the substrate. But the moment you want fruiting bodies, the crop needs fresh air — a drop to roughly fresh-air levels is what tells the mushroom to stop running and start pinning.
Miss that switch and the whole flush suffers — the very thing that decides your marketable weight is invisible in the air.
Long, thin stems reaching for air
Small, under-developed caps
Aborted pins and uneven flushes
Batch-to-batch inconsistency
Mushroom cultivation is really a sequence of CO2 set-points. VentPlus lets you dial in each one and holds it hands-free — so every stage gets exactly the air it needs.
Mycelium tolerates — and often benefits from — high CO2, commonly 5,000–20,000 ppm. The NDIR sensor reads up to 5,000 ppm and shows 5,000+ above that, so during colonisation it confirms the room is comfortably in the high band; the precise control work happens later, in the pinning and fruiting range, which sits well within the sensor's measuring range.
A sharp drop to fresh-air levels — for most species under ~1,000 ppm — triggers pinning. VentPlus ventilates automatically to reach and hold that low band.
Low, steady CO2 gives short stems and full caps. VentPlus keeps the fan cycling so the room never drifts back up while the flush develops.
Exact ranges vary by species — so every threshold on VentPlus is yours to set.
The VentPlus solution
Because mushrooms give off CO2, controlling a crop room is mostly about ventilation — bringing in fresh air at the right moment. VentPlus reads CO2 with a precision NDIR sensor and drives your exhaust or fresh-air fan through its built-in relay: fan on when CO2 rises above your limit, fan off once fresh air brings it back down. It is completely plug-and-play — plug the fan into the AC socket, set your thresholds on the front panel, and it works 24×7. Rated for high-humidity environments up to 95% RH — built for the conditions of a working crop room.
For mushroom farms the model is the HO-202 — the same VentPlus Main Unit used in homes and offices — because a crop room is a ventilation job: one relay driving your exhaust or fresh-air fan.
With Wi-Fi enabled, it also logs CO2, temperature and humidity to a secure dashboard, so you can watch a crop room from your phone and fine-tune the band for each species and stage over successive flushes.
The NDIR sensor tracks CO2 in the crop room every few seconds, all day.
When CO2 climbs above your set limit, the relay switches on the exhaust or fresh-air fan to draw in outside air and pull the level down.
Once CO2 reaches your lower limit the fan switches off — so the room stays in the pinning or fruiting band without running the fan any longer than needed.
Monitor the CO2 in your mushroom growing rooms live from your phone, tablet or laptop. The online VentPlus dashboard logs real-time and historical CO2 data for every room, so you can confirm each stage — from pinning to fruiting — is holding its target band around the clock, and catch a rising CO2 level before it stunts your pins or caps. The chart below shows how VentPlus keeps CO2 within the desired range instead of letting it drift.
VentPlus remote monitoring website — same interface works on mobile, tablet and desktop
Want to try it yourself? Open a live VentPlus dashboard right now — no login, no signup, straight into a real device's data.
Open a Live Monitoring Dashboard →Tap Open a Live Monitoring Dashboard and give it about 2 seconds to log in and load the live demo.
Tell us about your farm — species, crop-room size and existing ventilation — and we'll recommend the right VentPlus configuration. VentPlus is also used across greenhouses and polyhouses, where the same instrument does the opposite job of enriching CO2 for higher yield.
or call +91 99170 80700
Downloads
Get the full VentPlus CO2 monitor & controller documentation — everything you need to evaluate, buy and install.