Thursday, November 17, 2011

Er... not so much

I googled "solar-powered grow lights" and as I predicted, lots of hits came up. And as I should have predicted if I had bothered to think about it, most were targeted to the grow-op demographic. As it turns out though, you'd pretty much have to have a grow-op to make it worth the money, because solar-powered grow lights are incredibly expensive. I mean six, seven hundred dollars.

Yeah: I don't think so.

Mind you, the grow light itself is quite expensive, but even accounting for that, the cost of the whole thing is prohibitive. It would take years to save enough on power bills to recovered the initial outlay. Same with hybrid cars, by the way. I wanted to buy a hybrid, but then I discovered it would take twenty years to save enough on gas to make up for the higher sticker price.

In management (yes, management is one of my many unused skills) we learn that training employees is pointless; instead you just have to "make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard." Sadly for the environment, the right thing is almost always considerably harder than the wrong thing.

You know what I'm gonna do instead? I'm gonna buy a solar meter. It's a little device that you stick in the ground, and after 24 hours, it tells you whether that spot is full sun, part sun, or full shade. Then I'll do the math, and if I find it's really worth it, I'll just buy a regular grow light and run an extension cord to the wall. I've been meaning to do that (the extension cord, that is) in any case to plug in other environmentally-wrong devices such as heat pads (if my hotbox proves insufficient to winter the plants), Xmas lights, and a heat lamp for my raven.

Speaking of which, another thing I need is a dog house for my raven. As I keep telling you, gardening is so wild, it makes psychedelic drugs redundant.

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