Cannatrol Cool Cure: Your Questions Answered
We sat down with an experienced grower to talk through how he runs his Cannatrol Cool Cure C2, from harvesting fresh material straight into the unit, to using it to finish off an almost-dry crop. Here's everything he covered, in his own words.
The basics
Who is the Cannatrol Cool Cure for?
It's aimed squarely at the indoor hobby grower. "This is mostly for the indoor hobby grower market. If you're using the Cannatrol for the full cycle, for the dry and the cure, this is your 1.2 x 1.2m tent and smaller."
If you're only using it to finish off a crop, you can run a bigger grow: "If you're going to use your tent to dry and then finish off with curing, then you're probably up to something like a 2.4 x 1.2m. Obviously that's all down to yield, and things like flower structure and how much you load in it."
Is it easy to set up and run?
Very. "It's as simple as closing the door and pressing dry," "Your settings are all preset. Once you've put them in once, you never have to do them again, they just save."
He runs his over the app: "You can link it up to your app, which is how I do it, so you don't have to touch the screen. You can view it anywhere in the world. When I was over in Germany, I was checking it to make sure it was still in cure, which is a nice feature."
Once it's dialled in, there's almost nothing to do: "You set the settings and walk away. Most of the success is literally down to the settings."
Does the room I keep it in matter?
Not much: that's the point of it. "Your environment and the room you're in don't play that much of a factor," He explains. "You can keep it in a room from around 5 degrees up to 38 degrees, so you've got a really wide range where you can still maintain that perfect zone."
He describes it as its own sealed ecosystem: "Whereas a lot of the other units are more susceptible to outside swings. If you put them in a hot place, they don't do the job."
Is it noisy?
The Cannatrol uses a patented vapour-pressure system (Vaportrol® Technology) rather than a compressor, which is why it runs so quietly. His verdict on the noise: silent.
"Mine is currently in my bedroom and it doesn't make a noise. There's no cycling, no on and off, no humming, no resonance."
What about light pollution?
Sorted by an auto-off screen. "Mine just stays off," says the grower. "You tap the screen, it comes on for 20 seconds, then it goes off."
Loading the unit
How do you prepare the unit before a fresh harvest?
"I give the unit a good clear out, make sure all the shelves are fresh, remove the hydration sponge, and make sure the tray at the bottom is empty of water."
Do you need to use cleaning products?
No. "I usually don't, just a little bit of water, a little bit of soap. I wipe the inside out. I don't try and introduce anything fragrant in there."
Running dry and cure
What settings do you use, and how long does it take?
He sticks to Cannatrol's own presets. "I went straight to the end, whoever's done the work, they've got the answers already."
The unit has both seven-day and four-day dry presets. His sweet spot: "Seven-day dry, three or four days cure seems to be the sweet spot." When the dry cycle finishes, "it automatically clicks onto cure", you don't have to do anything.
What do I do with the moisture sponge?
On fresh material, take it out at first. "The first couple of days you want to remove the sponge from the unit completely. After a couple of days you can wet it up, it doesn't want to be completely saturated. Give it a squeeze under the tap so it absorbs enough to not be dripping through."
After that, it's a small maintenance job: "Every day or two I go in and top the sponge up. That's the only thing you need to do, maintain that sponge moisture all the way through curing."
How often should I empty the drip tray?
Daily to start with, but it fills slowly. "Even when you ram the machine full, it's not filling up in 24 hours, you've probably got 48 hours until you need to change it. If you're changing it daily, you'll run into no issues whatsoever." By day three or four, "you're only getting residual moisture in there, you're just getting spoons of water."
The science bit
What's the difference between drying and curing?
"Drying is to remove the bulk amount of water from the plant, to get it down to a point where it's smokable. Curing is refining that."
In more detail: drying removes the free water that isn't bound to anything in the plant. Curing works on what's left, "breaking down the residual material within the flower and the leaf to give you the best finish smoke. It's about breaking those sugars down to give you a nice, rounded, perfect flavour."
What is water activity (aw)?
It's not the same as moisture content, it's about how available the water is. "aw is available water, free water, it's about how water is held in flower. It's not about being able to dry a flower back and then rehydrate it. It's about slow-drying it, hitting that target and maintaining it."
The target for dried flower is 0.58 to 0.62 aw, and "0.6 seems to be the absolute sweet spot, so the plant can still break down its sugars, it can still cure, but it retains the best profile."
Why does my flower smell less when I first open the unit?
Counter-intuitively, that's a good sign it's working. "A lot of people expect an eruption of smell when they open it, because they've got this amazing flower, but you usually get the opposite. And that's because the unit works so well that it locks everything in."
It's down to vapour pressure holding the terpenes inside the resin heads. Change the environment and the smell comes flooding back: "If you take a bud out and stick it in a plastic pop-top and leave it in your car for an hour, it will absolutely fill that car with smell, because you're now changing the environment they're in."
He was caught out himself the first time: "I was a bit like, 'oh, where's the smell?' Then you give it a squeeze and the smell just erupts out of the flower."
What happens if flower dries too fast?
You get case hardening, a dry shell trapping wet flower inside. "The most common way people over-dry is hanging and speed-drying, or trimming everything onto nets. You get really dry flower on the outside and still a bit of sponge in the middle."
People then try to fix it by "sweating" it in a tub, but the damage is done: "You've already passed that prime point. The outside of your flower is over-dry, and that's where all your compounds are. All the resin heads, all the terpenes are on the outside."
Worse, that trapped moisture is a mould risk: "If you go over 0.65 up towards 0.7, that starts to favour a lot of moulds. This is why a lot of growers see bud rot in the centre of buds, they've over-dried, got a dry outside and a wet moisture gradient in the middle that can't get out." The result is "flower of low quality, bad flavour, not a good smell."
The fix, the grower says, is simple: "Dry slowly, then put it into something like a Cannatrol."
Yield and capacity
How much dried flower do you get from six trays?
"It varies slightly, but on average you're looking at around 10 ounces dried, if you put in decent-sized stems with dense, well-formed flower, after you've manicured it all up."
Can I fit more in if the flower is already dried?
Yes, significantly more. Because dry flower is flatter and denser, "you can fill all of the shelves. You can buy the extra shelves and put in eight, 10 or 12." For dry-to-cure loads, he reckons on roughly "a kilo in, a kilo out, because you're not rehydrating, you're just finishing off the dry process."
Two ways to use it
Can I dry elsewhere and just finish the cure in the Cannatrol?
Absolutely, and the Cannatrol team recommend it. "I spoke to the guys at Cannatrol in Germany and they said this method works really well, on the same settings."
The upside is capacity plus rescue: you dry in a bigger space where you've got room, then finish in the unit for a controlled cure. On the leaf, he passes on some expert advice: "When I spoke to Dr Justice, she said to cure with as much leaf material as you can, it gives you a better finish. I'd give it a light trim, remove the small fans, and cure with the leaf on."
If my flower is almost dry, do I use the dry or the cure setting?
Just go straight to cure. "If it feels like the flower's dry, I'd put it in for cure. If it's actually still a bit wet, it'll just pull it down to the zone anyway, it's still going to try and keep it in that spot. It'll either rehydrate ever so slightly using the sponge, or keep removing the excess."
The unit is reading conditions constantly: "It's constantly cycling the air and sensing what's happening. Everything you see is real time, you can look on your phone and see it's gone up 0.1 of a degree, or the dew point's dropped 0.1."
Storage and extras
What's the best way to store flower after curing?
The grower uses Grove Bags, then puts them back in the unit. "If I've got leftover flower, I put it into a larger Grove bag and place it on the very lower shelf I'm not using, then restart a dry cycle. It's almost like having a mini Cannatrol within a Cannatrol, the bag holds the correct humidity, cycling between 58 and 62, but it's maintained at the same temperature."
The key principle running through all of it: "Keeping that set temperature from harvest, through dry, cure and storage, that limits the amount of compounds that volatilise and off-gas."
Does the app show graphs?
Not that we've found, but there's a cheap workaround. "I did that using a Bluetooth sensor. It cost £10 off eBay, just a data logger. Chucked it in and it gives you all the graph."
Thinking about a Cannatrol Cool Cure for your setup? Get in touch and we'll help you find the right model.
