bonsaial1

The plant only needs direct light about 7 to 8 hours anyway. Why the grow lights. 40 watt four foot lights will not do anything for higher woody stemmed plants. You would need about 350 watts per sq ft. to do any real growing. Thats a lot of 4 ft. tubes. You can get higher wattage tubes like for a reef aquarium, but the ballasts are expensive. 4 ft.tube would be 110 watts. 8 tubes would be about a foot wide x 4 ft. long = 4 sq. feet. 880 divided by 4 = 220. Still a little shy for the needs of the plant. The sun at high noon at the equator has a color temperture of 5000 kelvin degrees,(5000K) with a color rendition index of 100%, (CRI). The best light can provide the color temp. at 5000k, but the CRI is about 91% and the intensity is no where like the tropics. The plants I have seen grown under lights get lanky, with big leaves due to no photosynthesis due to wrong color spectrum. On top of all that the bulbs need to be changed every two months due to the spectrum moving, on even the best bulbs, to the red side. This will cause yellow leaves.

Will the sides let any diffused light in. This would help, and be sufficient for filling in the between time.

I would leave the gro lights to the African violet growers.

Bonsaial