Indoor Grow Light Seed Starting

 This year I want to run an experiment and see just how much food I can grow in my new and improved garden. Normally, you can't put seeds or plants into the ground until mid-May or you risk frost damage or frost kills. I work out of state so if a frost gets announced, I'm likely not home to cover my plants and they get killed off. This happens every year to me. Young plants are a bit more susceptible to frost damage in a light frost but a "hard" frost will kill everything.

 To get as much of a jump on the growing season as I can get, I am going to attempt to start some of my seeds indoors under a growing light. "Real" grow-lamps are very expensive but research over the past couple months leads me to believe that seeds can be started and decent growth can be maintained with other types of lamps.

 There are three key characteristics to lamp light that determine whether or not the lamp will function as a grow lamp. First is the Lumens the lamp produces. A lumen (symbol: lm) is the unit of luminous flux, a measure of the perceived power of visible light emitted by a source. Just think of it as the brightness of the light, though there is more to it. The number of lumens the light has should be printed on the box somewhere. The generally recommended minimum lumen level for a grow light is 4,000 but over 6,000 is better.

 The second characteristic is the temperature of the light, measured in Kelvin. Note: this is not the heat temperature, but rather the color hue of the light. It is measured in degrees of Kelvin (K) on a scale from 1,000 to 10,000. Typically, Kelvin temperatures for commercial and residential lighting applications fall somewhere on a scale from 2000K to 6500K. A light bulb's color temperature lets us know what the look and feel of the light produced will be. Lower K lights are "soft and warm" and higher K lights are bright and harsh to our eyes. Grow lights need a K rating of 6,000 or above.

 The last characteristic is the color spectrum. True grow lights emit light from the red through the blue ranges of the spectrum. But that is one reason why they are expensive; it is more complicated to build a light that is multi-spectral. Most indoor lights have a narrow band of included colors. If you can afford a true grow light, go for it. I can't, so I selected a light that is more blue (the radiation is blue light but what the human eye sees is a harsh white light).

 If the grow light is your primary light source, which it is in my case, then it needs to be on for most of the day, 20 hours minimum. That can add up to a lot of electricity over the course of several months. So mine set up is going to run off of my solar electric system that I recently built.

 To keep other costs down, I wanted to use things that I already own and keep purchases to a minimum. You aren't saving any money growing your own food if you have to buy a lot of stuff. For my system, the only thing I bought new, specifically for the grow light build, was the light and it was $79 at Lowe's. The light I chose is one I recently installed in my mud room to replace a fluorescent light fixture that went bad. I replaced it with an LED light that provides 4,000 lumens at 6,500 K.

 I used an old gas grill that was on my scrap metal pile for the frame. I removed the top part, where the grill and flames would be, and striped it down to the frame.

I needed a surface to set the seed starting tray and was going to cut up some wood and figure out how to attach it when I remembered the grill rack inside the burner unit should be exactly the right size. So I attached that with small bolts and washers.

Perfect fit and I don't have to worry about the wood getting wet and rotting.

 I looked around the basement for a plastic bin that was big enough for the seed tray to fit inside and I also needed to insulate it because this will be in my basement where it stays about 50-55 degrees, which is much too cool for most seeds to start. I had saved the insulation from some boxes of mail-order foods we ordered when my wife was recovering from surgery. This is very good insulation and it was faced with aluminum foil (or aluminized Mylar, I'm not sure which). The insulation will allow the tray and seed medium to warm up and the aluminum will reflect more light to the plants once they sprout.

 For this first trial, I seeded the flat with three types of lettuce and one type of spinach. These are cool weather crops and both are frequently grown indoors with grow lights. However, these are older seeds, some from 2020, and germination rates won't be 100%. I planted extra seeds in each cell so if I get at least 30% germination I will be fine.

 

 As you can see here, this light, as powerful as it is, only draws 43 watts of electricity. My Delta Pro has a capacity of 7,400 watt hours and it is hooked up to 960 watts of solar panels, so it will never run out of power.

 The picture on the left shows the whole setup. I do have a small worry that there might be too much heat and the seeds won't sprout and if they do that they might get burnt back by the heat. But I am hoping that the water in the seed tray will prevent too much heat from building up. Evaporating water should cool it down as should the cool room.

 The picture of the right shows the interior of the grow box. The aluminum surfaces insure that the light is multi-directional so the plants, if they grow, won't be "leggy", as most plants get when light comes from one direction only.

It's an experiment and nothing is lost if it fails. But if it works, I will have a virtually free way to start plants indoors so that I can transplant partially grown plants instead of trying to start seeds outdoors before conditions are optimal. If this works, I could have fresh produce in June instead of September and that is a huge improvement. Fingers crossed.

	1 March 2024 Update: I have been monitoring this system since I set it up and it looks like I typically use 12% of the battery capacity over the 14-15 hours that there is no sun. Because of the mountain to my south, no direct sun hits the solar panels until about 9:00 in the morning. This early in the year, sunset is at 5:00. That gives me eight hours of sunlight, though there is some reflected light before and after those hours. Even so, the Delta Pro is fully charged by 12:00 noon and stays fully charged until the sun goes down. My peak collection time, because of the orientation of the panels, is between 12:00 and 2:00. During that time, I am inputting between 850 and 1,200 watts of electricity.

Shear Pins to Protect Your Equipment

 If you have a piece of equipment that gets turned by a shaft connected to a motor, you probably have one or more shear pins in it.

 A shear pin is a safety device designed to shear in the case of a mechanical overload, preventing other, more expensive or less-easily replaced parts from being damaged. As a mechanical sacrificial part, it is analogous to an electric fuse.

 My son inherited a 24 inch snowblower from my father, so it is probably 10 - 12 years old. It has been used pretty hard since we live in farm country and our driveways are long and the parking lots at our houses are large. This snowblower has been used to clear snow at three different properties.

 I used my son's snowblower today to clear a path and noticed that it wasn't throwing snow very well and it also hard a hard time moving forward. I suspected that the drive belt was loose, but when I took it to my garage to work on, I noticed there was no air in the tires and the rims were just spinning inside the tires. That was an easy fix.

 This snowblower has four shear pins for four separate blades in the chute. 

 As you can see, there is nothing in the hole. The hard part about replacing the pin is lining up the hole to the sheared off pin so that you can drive it out with a hammer and drift pin (or pin punch, whatever you call it where you live). This one was easy to line up because the pin was not cleanly sheared off, it was jagged, and easy to see.

 This shows the next section of blades with the proper shear pin in place.

 Here is what was left of the pin once I drove it out of the shaft. It had not been broken long and was not rusted fast. I have a snow blower on my Kubota tractor and I had to drill out a broken shear pin and that was tough to do.

 The sheared pin at the bottom, a whole pin in the middle, and the retaining clip for the pin at the top. This is a commonly used pin for small snow blowers so I won't have any trouble getting replacements. I I have two parts trays full of assorted shear pins but they are for larger pieces of equipment. Lowe's and Tractor Supply both carry this style and size pin.

 Word of warning. I have a temporary pin in place until I can go get the proper ones. It is a shear pin of the right diameter, but it is too long. NEVER insert a bolt as a shear pin. Bolts are generally too hard and will not shear properly and you are likely going to really damage your equipment.

 Now, there are "Shear Bolts" for larger, heavier duty pieces of equipment such as a rotary mower, but they are marked by "grades". Grade 2 and Grade 5 are the two most common Shear Bolt grades.

 You can identify these bolts by the chart below. But, I wouldn't rely on it 100% if you inherited or bought a big can of misc. bolts. Your best bet, to protect yourself and your equipment, is to buy the exact shear bolts and shear pins that you need for your equipment, put extras in a bag or tray, and clearly mark what they are for.

Tree Felling and Milling Planks

 I have a lot of dead and dying trees on my residential property, mostly pines. These were planted 70-80 years ago as Christmas trees but those that didn't sell were allowed to grow and they are reaching their end of life stage.  I have cut down at least 40 trees in my 3.1 acre yard in the past twenty years and there are still quite a few to go. Luckily, there generally isn't a hurry, I take care of them as I have the time.

This weekend I cut down a double-trunked pine on the west side of my property. The tree is 38 inches in diameter at its base and I don't have a saw that can cut that easily so I chose to cut each of the two trunks separately. My 18 inch chain saw can handle that with no problem.

 

 

This tree had a bird house mounted to the trunk. I made that house from a length of a hollow log to which I added a roof and floor. Blue Birds liked it so I want to keep it. I cut the left side trunk first.

 

I needed this part of the tree to fall to the left so I notched the left side. Normally, the notch would be more triangular but sawdust was flying in my face and I couldn't see very well. So, I did a plunge cut to connect the top and bottom cuts. It worked just fine and the tree dropped exactly where I wanted it to fall.

 

Once the tree was on the ground I trimmed off all the branches and cut the trunk into pieces small enough that I could carry them to the burn pile.

 

The second trunk had a hard lean and I could only drop it in this direction. But again, it landed where I needed it to go.

 

I noticed that both trunks were solid logs even though the tree has been dead for a couple years. So I decided to mill some planks from them. At the same time I was burning the rest of the tree and melting scrap down to salvage lead.

 

I have a chain saw mill, the "Alaska Mill" type. I also have a 55cc saw with a 20 inch bar. That size engine is smaller than the generally recommended size but it works fine if you cut slow enough. The mill requires a smooth, flat surface so I use this homemade guide rail system to make the first cut. It works great for logs up to ten feet long.

 

Once the first slab is cut from the log I have to adjust the mill to the desired thickness and the mill then slides across the top of the now flat surface of the log. This goes much faster than the first cut. I then flipped the first slab over and recut it to get another plank from that.

 

I got three planks cut before I had to stop for the day. They are each 5/4 inches thick and ten to fourteen inches wide. I will use my circular saw to rip them to six or eight inch wide boards and then run them through my planned to get smooth finished one inch thick boards. These will be used to build a sliding barn door for my woodshed.

 

While I was burning the tree parts and milling the lumber, I was also salvaging lead from a bucket of scrap metal from a local garage. I have a large iron ladle that I can put about six pounds of lead scraps in and I set that over the hot coals of the burn pile. I was able to salvage these 44 ingots, each weighing roughly 1.5 pounds for a total of 65 pounds of clean lead. At current prices, that is a bit over $68 of recycled lead. I can sell this now or hold onto it as a barter item for the future. The lead was completely free and it is only a third of the scrap I currently have on hand.