Give Me Some Sunshine

This year I got a couple of tropical/tender plants that would need to be overwintered indoors.

I do have a sunny south window that I can use for plants. With the daylight hours limited as they are in winter, and the prevalence of cloudy days this year here in the Midwest (Fort Wayne, Indiana, zone 5), I embarked on a mission to find supplemental lights for my plants. I could use them for some indoor seedlings in spring too.

I once (when new in US) spent hours to find the optimum toilet roll to buy. With grow lights there is a lot of technicality - brightness, lumens, PAR, PPFD, LUX, Color Rendering Index (CRI) and so forth. I was soon overwhelmed. 

LED grow lights were the way to go. This much I knew - they were the most efficient and durable, and prices have come down significantly. I looked at the most popular (review count and rating) grow lights on amazon, like hydrofarm's, and deduced that a 100 Watt incandescent equivalent, that is, around 20 Watt LED should be sufficient for my purposes.

Early on I decided I didn't want the red/ blue or 'burple' lights. It just wasn't aesthetically pleasing. I like to see my plants in passing and also wanted to be able to move the set-up to close living quarters. Just as a human would not live on protein bars alone, I felt plants deserved a full spectrum as well!

I was very tempted to use shop lights, especially at their Walmart prices. But hanging them was a bit of a challenge for me. I would have given them more consideration if I had only seedling trays on a shelf, and not taller plants of varying heights.

The root of the problem of grow light selection is two-fold - there are no widely accepted performance matrices and no standardized specification labeling across the available grow lights. It was odd that there was a sea of vendors but not much from reliable names like GE or Philips. The more I looked, the more I kept looking! Then I took a break, and to cut a long story short, decided to see a few specific ones and whether they met my requirements.  One name I had come across several times was Sansi, and I chose it for these reasons: 

• good coverage area from single lights
• company with proper website and other specialty lighting products
• 5 year unlimited warranty says a lot
• all YouTube reviews good 
• reasonable pricing 
• lights are recommended to be higher up and not just a few inches above, and kept on for fewer hours

The major battle over, the war was still to be won! I needed cords, timers and most challenging - a stand to hang the lights. Here is what I ended up with:

• SANSI LED Plant Grow Light Bulbs UV Full Spectrum Daylight Garden 24W -  I got 2 of these from ebay where the manufacturer sells returned items at a discount. I made an offer of $14 each and was accepted. Also available on amazon. 24 Watt seemed ample for my purposes of overwintering as well as providing supplemental lights to seedlings. 
• Timer - Where there is a feature, there is an user! I never thought I would indulge in a Wi-Fi connected timer like Merkury Innovations Smart Plug. But the price was at par with others, and I have since discovered the convenience of being able to control it on phone. Having said that, it does need named 2.4 GHz band, and you rely on fidgety technology!
• Cord, socket and clamp - Got ProTorch 1-Watt Incandescent Clamped Work Light from Lowe's. Least pleased with this item - the clamps are not sturdy at all, and the 6 ft cord length is barely sufficient. I will be on the lookout for a better clamping system. Note that I have removed the reflector to not hinder heat dissipation. 
• Stand - Using  Mainstays Adjustable Rolling Garment Rack for this. It is cheap and has adjustable height. I removed one of the two base rods just to have greater flexibility in placing pots (kept one for stability). 

I wanted to share this set up because I see a lot of people of Facebook gardening groups that suffer from the dilemma of choosing a grow light just as I did initially. Of course, needs and context may be varying, and so I have laid out mine in this post.

I have now moved some of my plants to the darkest corner of my living room where there is no natural light. Only one light is clamped to an adjacent shelf. I keep the lights on for 8 hours, with a 1 hour break at half time. The plants here (lemon, geranium, jasmine, bougainvillea) are all doing okay for about a month now. The lemon tree is thriving and the petunia (under the other light) is just about surviving. The smart timer comes in particularly handy here to arbitrarily switch off when there are guests and share the control with my husband through Google Home.

References
[1] https://learn.eartheasy.com/guides/led-light-bulbs-comparison-charts/
[2] https://www.gardenmyths.com/led-grow-lights-the-myth-about-watts/