Wealthymr's blog: "The Original Indoor Grower"

The Idea stage

I was a natural born entrepreneur and by age 17 had a steady income from a Curb painting business I had started. I married at 17 as well and was blessed with a child at the same age. This pressure to provide for a family had my mind open to any money making possibilities. My father in Law owned an electrical lighting supply company in LA and gave me an in on wholesale lighting supplies so I began selling Fluorescent lights to area businesses on a door to door basis to earn extra income to raise my family.

I was developing other areas of marketing these lighting products and received an order from a local business for an outdoor lighting system for his parking lot. My father in Laws company did not sell this type of lighting so I went to a distributor in Los Angeles that specialized in custom lighting products. I met with the owner of the company and we began to discuss my project. In our discussion we began to talk about a metal halide lighting system for my client, he then joked that a 1000 watt MH Bulb put out a light spectrum so similiar to that of the sun that you could grow plants with it. I joked back with him that maybe I'll buy one for myself to grow with, he said with a bulb like the MH you could grow a room full of plants. I laughed and told him how just a couple months ago I tried our fluorescent grow lights in my closet and tried to grow a plant and though it sprouted it got about 6 inches, fell over and died..., He smiled and said it's basic math, you cant take a 40watt bulb and expect it to give you the lighting necessary to mimic the sun, he said as a lighting engineer he knew that that 40 watt bulb needed to be inches away from the plant to get it to grow but it would never give enough light to reach past the plant top, He said in general terms consider you need 100 lumens of light per Sq Inch around the plant to get it to grow like an outdoor plant would....a 40watt bulb may give you 2 lumens of light....That made since and a light bulb went off in my head, I coukld sell the shit out of these bulbs to growers.....

I worked with him to develop a Metal Halide grow light system for growing indoors, The first challenge was the reflector hood, these bulbs we mainly used in Parking lots and warehouses. The bulb required a heavy duty ballast to power it and it was the size of a desktop computer case. The typical reflectors were not designed to cast light in a spectrum or area if you will, to grow plants. He then drew out a reflector that would work, It had a white enamel inner core and grey outside. He knew of a place that could make it so we had the deflectors custom made for our system. The next issue was Power...Warehouse lighting used a 400 watt bulb with the ballast attatched to the top of the diffuser, the problem is a 1000 watt bulb ballast was too big, besides who would want to have to get an electriction in to wire up a ceiling electrical socket to run it. our solution, we ran a heavy duty cord from the ballast to the light and reflector/hood assembly, this allowed the ballast to remain on the floor and plug into the exsisting wall sockets. The cord was 12 feet long which allowed for a 9 foot maximum height which we determined was the highest you could go to keep the 100 lumens per inch we needed for growth...The end product..The first Grow light made for indoor growing, which in short time was copied by many and is still the norm today.