Greenhouse Lighting
Lighting is both crop energy and climate pressure. Solar radiation warms the greenhouse faster than the controller can always reject heat, while grow lights help the east-zone hydroponics rack and shelf crops when DLI is low. Verdify tracks the light story as a loop: outdoor solar, indoor lux, transmission through the structure, accumulated DLI, planner-managed trigger bands, and Lutron circuit runtime.
Open the full live lighting dashboard
Current Light State
These cards are live Grafana panels. If they are unavailable, treat them as the current-light view rather than the proof of the whole lighting story; the seven-day rollups and forecast panels below show whether the room is light-limited or heat-limited.
Light Into The Room
Indoor light is not a simple copy of outdoor light. Polycarbonate diffusion, sun angle, tree shade, greenhouse geometry, and sensor saturation all change what the plants actually see. The indoor LDR is useful for timing and relative changes, but it saturates near bright conditions and is not a calibrated PAR sensor.
DLI And Grow-Light Decisions
DLI is the plant-facing summary: how much usable light accumulated over the day. Grow lights add photons, but they also add electrical load and heat, so their value depends on the crop need, time of day, and the resource-use story. The controller keeps the graphs readable by showing policy bands and circuit state rather than every internal tunable line.
Circuit Policy And Forecast Bands
The two Lutron circuits are tracked separately. Each circuit has its own DLI goal, local-hour window, natural-light ON threshold, OFF threshold, dwell guards, expected state, and observed state. Tempest outdoor illuminance is the primary trigger signal, with the indoor light sensor retained as greenhouse context rather than the main outdoor/overcast classifier.
The forecast-band graph binds the same policy into the future: observed and forecast natural light are compared against the main and grow circuit ON/OFF bands, and expected-on markers show when the controller should supplement daylight. Firmware state and reason fields show the database, dashboard, dispatcher, ESP32, and Lutron state path.
Biological Activity Window
Verdify treats the main lighting runtime as the greenhouse’s global biological activity window. The dispatcher mirrors the main circuit start hour and target qualified-light minutes into firmware activity_* tunables. Direct wetting then uses the same activity window, with zone-specific start offsets and drydown holds.
Current confirmed policy:
| Policy | Live value |
|---|---|
| Activity start | 06:00 |
| Activity duration | 960 min |
| Activity end | 22:00 |
| Wall/south/west direct-wet window | 07:00-20:00 |
| Center direct-wet window | 08:00-19:00 |
| Direct-wet minimum temperature | 65°F |
The activity window is permission, not demand. Lights still follow per-circuit lux/runtime logic, misters still require climate demand, and irrigation/fertigation still require their own schedules. The shared gate keeps light, wetting, fert paths, and drydown aligned without crop-specific firmware logic.
Seven-Day Rollup
The daily rollup is the planning view: was the greenhouse light-limited, did grow lights fill the gap, and did solar timing line up with greenhouse electrical load?
Forecast Context
Solar forecast is a control input. If the next day is clear, Verdify expects heat load and may need shade, venting, mist, or pre-cooling. If the day is dim, the lighting and hydroponics pages become more important. Solar alignment helps offset grow-light cost, but it does not make lighting free: cloudy forecasts, late-day heat, crop DLI needs, and circuit runtime still matter.
Related Pages
- Climate for how light becomes heat and VPD pressure.
- Hydroponics for the east-zone crops under supplemental lighting.
- Resource Use for the solar-aligned power and cost story.
- AI-Writable Tunables for the bounded lighting-related tactics Iris can write.