08:56 – It was 48.4 (9C) when I took Colin out at 0645, mostly clear. Barbara is off this morning to volunteer at the friends bookstore, filling in for someone who had people coming in from out of town.
Yesterday, we got the second shelving unit set up in the lab/work area downstairs, and a lot of stuff moved from stacks on the floor onto the first shelving unit. The second one will remain empty until I decide what I want to go where.
As we arrange and reorganize down there, I’ve been thinking about installing a couple more LED shop lights as grow lights. We have a couple of worktables that we use only for binning chemicals when we’re making up chemical bags. They’re empty 99% of the time, and we could use one or both of those to hold herbs and vegetables in containers. The environment is climate-controlled, and free of the animal and insect pests that often attack our outside plants.
The big question is how much light they’d need. The LED shop lights we have consume only about 40W per fixture and provide about 4,000 lumens. I could put them on a timer and let them run 12 or 14 hours a day. They’re bright in terms of indoor lighting, but nothing close to actual sunlight. More like daylight in open shade.
When I read about home grow light setups, the articles were talking about very large lighting units like 1,600W metal halide lamps. That’s a lot more than I want to get into.