grow light

I've been kind of bummed about not being able to garden the past few weeks, so I indulged an indoor gardening project: a DIY grow light. I built it out of PVC pipe and fluorescent shop lights.

I used this plan and parts list, with one modification: the plan shows the lights hanging from one length of PVC. I thought that might not be enough to support three shop lights, which are surprisingly heavy, so I made two parallel supports and connected them with T-joints at the base. I didn't connect them at the top because I was concerned about my ability to get everything exactly square. Which turned out to be a valid concern; in fact, nothing is square. I don't care; it's not like it's a house or something. All it has to do is hold up the lights, and it does that quite well.

The big surprise of the project was opening the shop lights and discovering a mass of loose wires instead of a power cord and plug. Oops, the plans didn't say anything about that! I guess the shop lights are meant to be hung from the ceiling. I had no idea how to deal with that so I called my dad for help. He told me what to do and with his advice, I was able to wire all three lamps. (I confess, I took the easy way out and didn't ground them.)

Turns out the hardest part of wiring the lights was the sharp edges all over the metal box, which left me with tiny cuts all over my hands. Too bad I didn't know about the black pepper home remedy. Once wired up, the shop lights are held together with a simple wooden frame, and then hung from the PVC frame with a chain that can be raised or lowered. I read on the Gardenweb forum that regular "cool white" fluorescent bulbs work just as well as special grow lights.

Voila: a working grow light. And it only took 6 trips to the big box store! One to buy the PVC pipe. The second to buy the PVC joints, lights, and hardware. The third to buy the second PVC pipe, after I realized the frame needed to be sturdier. The fourth to buy the wiring, which was missing from the parts list. The fifth to buy S-hooks, also missing from the parts list. The sixth to buy another bag of S-hooks, because the ding-danged bag held 3 hooks and I needed 4. By that point it was almost comical.

I finished the plant light last week but didn't have the energy to turn it on and sow my seeds until Sunday. What can I say, it was a long week. I have tons of seeds this year, thanks to a gift certificate for Johnny Seeds from my folks. I'm going to direct sow most of them but some need to be sown indoors ahead of time. And to my amazement, the yarrow and the basil are coming up already! Good grief, it's only been 3 days! I can't wait to see what comes up next. I'm experimenting with some plants I've never grown from seed before. I won't be crushed if some of them don't sprout, but of course I'll be thrilled if they do. We have a lot of new flower bed space to fill, and growing plants from seed sure is more economical than buying them in pots.

(One final note: The PDF plan says you can build a grow light for under $60. That may have been true when it was written, but it sure isn't true now. My lamp cost about twice that. Still, that's about half what I would have paid for a commercial grow light of similar size.)