Have you ever noticed that in your garden, you often get big fat growth on the top of your plants, the part closest to your grow light? Then, as you go further down your plant, your production gets smaller and smaller? This is because of the greater distance between your light source and the lower part of the plant.

To make matters worse, light suffers from the inverse-square law, meaning that the part of your plant that sits two feet from the light receives only 25% of the intensity received by the branch that is one foot away from the light.

This means that your 1,000-watt light is only a 250-watt light at two feet. Ouch! To counteract this problem and get huge production under the canopy, a lot of growers supplement their overhead lights with vertical lights that get closer to the sides and bottoms of their plants. This can mean much higher yields from a single plant because the whole plant is producing top to bottom.

The problem is that HID lamps put out a lot of heat, which can burn your plants (and yourself), if you’re not careful. It’s one thing to have all that heat above your head; it’s another to have it at body level. Just hanging a hot bulb from an overhead socket like a pendulum is not safe. Here’s a great way to install a properly cooled vertical light so that your plants can get maximum lumens for minimum cost.