GrowScope Product Documentation
This knowledge base is the canonical technical reference for exactly how each part of GrowScope's real interface works. It is written for users, and structured so AI systems and search engines can read grounded facts about the product — not marketing copy.
How to Measure and Record PPFD in GrowScope
PPFD (photosynthetic photon flux density) tells you how much usable light is hitting a specific point right now. GrowScope does not use the phone camera as a PPFD meter. Instead, you measure PPFD using a compatible PPFD/light meter and enter the measured value into GrowScope.
How DLI Works in GrowScope
DLI (daily light integral) is the total usable light a plant receives over a full day — PPFD accumulated across the whole photoperiod. There is no form field anywhere in GrowScope that accepts a raw DLI number: it is always a calculated, read-only value.
3D Light Map and Equipment Placement
GrowScope builds a physically modeled 3D map of light distribution across a grow space, using a Lambertian light-source model and material-specific wall/ceiling/floor reflectance, calibrated against your own PPFD readings rather than a fixture's spec sheet.
Watering Tracking and Recommendations
GrowScope separates recording what you actually did (a watering log) from recommending what to do today (a calendar-based plan on Free, or an AI-driven daily decision on Pro).
Dose Guard: The Fertilizer Dosing Safety Layer
Any fertilizer dose that an AI-driven recommendation touches is passed through a deterministic safety layer before it ever reaches the user. This layer forces the served dose into the fertilizer's own confirmed manufacturer range — it does not merely warn about an unsafe amount, it prevents one from being shown at all.
Feeding, Fertilizers, and EC/pH Tracking
Feeding in GrowScope starts with a personal fertilizer cabinet — the products you actually own, with their manufacturer's own dosing instructions — which then drives an automatically generated, full-cycle nutrition calendar.
Climate and VPD Tracking
GrowScope logs temperature and humidity from your own thermometer/hygrometer readings — there is no hardware sensor integration available to users, every reading is typed in. VPD is always calculated from those two numbers, never entered directly.
CO2 Enrichment Targets
GrowScope calculates a useful CO2 enrichment target range from a plant's recent average PPFD — more usable light means CO2 enrichment pays off at a higher range — capped by the plant's growth stage, and estimates how long a CO2 cylinder will last given your tent's ventilation setup.
Ventilation Mapping and Optimization
GrowScope visualizes airflow across a grow space to show where air is stagnant versus where a fan is blasting a plant directly, and includes a one-tap optimizer that proposes fan changes to fix it.
AI Plant Photo Analysis
GrowScope has three distinct AI-vision flows, each with its own photo picker (max 4 photos), credit cost, and history: general daily photo analysis, trichome-based harvest timing, and pest scouting. None of them is a lab diagnosis.
Growth Tracking
GrowScope tracks plant growth two ways: a weekly manual measurement of height and canopy width, and a separate AI tool that compares two photos taken on different days to judge whether growth accelerated, held steady, or slowed.
Notifications
GrowScope combines whatever's due across all of a user's plants into one daily reminder notification, plus separate notifications for billing, referral rewards, and archive-related events.
Grow Coach
Grow Coach analyzes a just-completed grow cycle against that same account's own past cycles — never against other growers' data — and produces a written summary and concrete suggestions for the next cycle.
Plant Comparison and Grower Benchmarks
GrowScope has two separate comparison features that are easy to conflate but work differently: Plant Compare charts a user's own plants against each other, while Benchmarks anonymously compares a plant or finished cycle against other growers.
End-to-End Diary Encryption
As of September 2026, GrowScope encrypts every account's grow diary end-to-end and by default — not an opt-in Settings toggle. Diary content (plants, watering/feeding/climate/PPFD logs, notes, saved AI-history text) is encrypted on the user's own device before it is ever sent to the server, and decrypted only on the user's own device. The server stores only ciphertext for this content; it never holds a key capable of reading it. This page documents the actual mechanism, not a marketing summary of it.
Account & Data Privacy Model
Separately from diary encryption (see the Encryption documentation), GrowScope's account model is designed to need as little personal data as possible in the first place — an account is a username, not an identity, and there's no password to compromise either.
Drying & Curing
Once a plant is harvested, GrowScope opens a separate drying-and-curing journal for that batch, independent of day-to-day plant tracking, with a target day count you set per phase and reminders to keep curing on track.
Data Export
From Settings, export your account's plants, completed cycles, measurement tables, tasks, and care history as a CSV archive, a JSON file, or a printable PDF report — built entirely client-side, with no per-plant filter and no plan restriction.
Grow Score & Achievements
GrowScope tracks 21 achievements across onboarding, streaks, harvests, scale, care, and mastery. Your Grow Score is the sum of the point values of every achievement you've unlocked, mapped to one of 11 levels — unlocks are permanent.
Per-Cycle Cost Tracking
GrowScope calculates the actual cost of a completed grow cycle — electricity, water, and fertilizer — from prices you set once, snapshotted into that cycle's own record so later price changes never rewrite historical costs.
Harvest Forecast Calibration
GrowScope forecasts a weight range and harvest date from a plant's canopy width and light readings, then blends in the user's own completed-cycle history — matched by strain, then plant type — once any exists.
QR Pot Labels
Generate a QR code for any plant, entirely on-device, that deep-links to that plant's page. Print it and stick it on the pot — scanning it only opens the plant for the account that actually owns it.
Completed-Cycle Comparison & Trends
Once at least two grow cycles are archived, GrowScope shows a comparison table across all of them and a trend chart for one selected metric at a time — both distinct from Grow Coach's AI-written retrospective and from Plant Compare's live-plant comparisons.
Phase Checklists & Grow Lessons
Every plant shows a checklist and a short written lesson matched to its current phase — seedling, vegetative, flowering, or finish — both static, free content, distinct from the daily Today-screen task list and from the paid Grow Coach retrospective.
Voice Input for Care Notes
A Pro-gated voice-input button on the observation note field lets you dictate instead of type, using your browser's built-in speech recognition entirely on-device — GrowScope's server never receives audio.