This would be cool if it was practical...

[THCPezDispenser]

Check this out. I was thinking (stoned of course ) how cool it would be if you could run fibre optic cable large enough to pipe sunlight into a grow room. You would get the lumens of an outdoor grow with the control of an indoor grow, and your lighting power costs (minus the huge initial investment) would be zero. So I searched a bit, and found this:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/EP1356231.html

Scroll down a bit (there is some whitespace in the page) to the description section. How cool is this? They mention HID lighting rather than sunshine, but this seems like an awesome application of fibre.

Anyone hear anything about this kind of setup? Or is this just someone patenting a prototype?

 

[THCPezDispenser]

The synopsis of the patent:

"There is provided in accordance with the present invention a lighting system comprising a light source providing optimal spectral characteristics for plant growth, a means for focusing light from said light source into a fibre optic transmission medium, a fibre optic cable for transmitting light from said remote light source to a light distribution means, and a light distribution means, to distribute light over a specified area above the plants. "

 

[THCPezDispenser]

I've been back from a hiatus to the forum, just going over some of my old posts... No one found this mildly interesting???

 

[4u2sm0ke]

Sorry THC just found the thread..what do you know about this is in in the future/

 

[That crazy vancouver guy]

I had the exact same concept/idea thought as that, Pez.

...build my own house with a giant grow room in the middle, lit by fiber optic cable/sunlight... thing is... you'd need a heck of a lot of fiber optic cable to make it viable... and then I thought... the fiber optic cable is just a conductor, right?... so why not have a bunch of them in the center of a collector mirror sort of idea... just another stoner thought....

 

[THCPezDispenser]

You'd have to think with the spread of high speed communications that the price of fiber is going to become next to nothing in the next decade, I like this idea because the heat is totally left out of the grow room itself, not to mention the cost of power to run it. You could even create some sort of switch once the sun goes down/cloundy days to run a HPS into it, would dramatically reduce the light bill by being able to run on sunlight when it is available.

 

[Rogue]

Check this out!