Metal halide for the vegetative stage.

(O assured them she could achieve a vegetative state without a grow lamp, although one of those sun reflectors was always nice.)

High-pressure sodium for the flowering phase.

Each lamp took a thousand-watt bulb.

Each bulb could light fifteen to twenty plants.

During the vegetative stage those lamps were going to be on sixteen to eighteen hours a day, so they were going to produce, in addition to light, a hell of a lot of heat, which, unless you’re intending to do Bikram yoga in there, is a problem.

(“I tried Bikram yoga,” O told the boys.

“And?”

“I didn’t like it.”

“Because?”

“They yelled at me,” she said. “If I wanted to get yelled at in high humidity, I’d just leave the shower on and wait for Paqu to show up.”)

You can’t have that kind of heat in a grow room because

(a) People have to work in there and

(b) It’s bad for the plants.

Primo marijuana grows best in a controlled temperature of 75°F, so what they needed in addition to-in fact, because of-all those lamps was

Air-conditioning.

Every one of those lamps required 2,800 BTUs (British Thermal Units) of cooling, and a fan to circulate the cooled air.

So a fifty-light grow room-that’s one thousand plants-needed 148,000 BTUs. Add to that the power needed to run the lamps and the fans, and you’re talking 80 kilowatts of power.

Your average residential living room is wired to handle a single thousand-watt bulb.

So-they had to not only rewire the house, they had to find more power and do it off the grid

Because the utility companies in addition to being rapacious, conscienceless sociopaths, are also…

Snitches.

If they notice an electric bill that is, say, twenty times what a normal house would use, they inform the police.