This post is part of a multi-part series on my indoor growing. If you want, you can start from Part 1.

Because there is a fairly small window in the porch area where my plants live, it seemed to make a bit of sense to get some grow lights. Apparently there is quite a bit of variation on what kind of grow lights you could get depending on what you’re favoring, and there’s a whole rabbithole one could go down for this, but I decided to skip all that and just pick the top result on Amazon searching for “grow lights”:

71ZqxA68gCL._SL1500_.jpg 45W LED Grow Light, UNIFUN New Light Plant Bulbs Plant Growing Bulb for Hydroponic Aquatic Indoor Plants

These arrived yesterday so I decided to put them to work through the day today to see how it would fare. Despite what the reviews say, these lights are fairly bright. I had some hesitancy that it might make a noticeable glow to my neighbors and I was right, since this is what I came home to today:

2018-03-01 20.49.53.jpg

In person they also seem fairly blinding:

2018-03-01 20.51.18.jpg

I’m trying to figure out the best way to not hurt my eyes too much going past this area, and I have some ideas of maybe walling off this section with some kind of two-way mirror material.

The plants themselves seem to be doing okay, having straightened up a bit after leaning over for the sun the past few days:

2018-03-01 20.52.27.jpg

That’s all for now. The parts from Adafruit and SparkFun all arrive tomorrow, so this weekend should have some starter posts as I try and get the sensors to work.

Continue on to Part 5.