A Closer Look at the Sansi 100W Tall Standing Grow Light

Everyone sets up their grow lights differently. For me, I want as few of them as possible. Sounds crazy to say that on a grow light website, but the reality is that one good grow light is better than 20 bad ones. So I look for lights that have a wide reach, as well as high PPFD. I'll be honest, I strayed from Sansi last year to try another well-known company's setup. It costs over $700, so I had high expectations. And guess what? It's barely enough to keep my pothos alive.

So when deciding on a setup for this room I went back to Sansi, who never lets me down.
Initially I had some grow lights hanging from the ceiling, which I usually love, but I felt
they took away from the main light fixture in the room.

I’m a sucker for a bamboo lampshade and wanted that to be the focus. So I went with something a little more subtle. Specifically the 100W Standing Grow Light.

The light intensity is high, but the breadth of the light is what really sold me on it. Usually you have to have a grow light very close to the plant in order to get enough light from them. For comparison, below is a non-sansi light. It’s about a foot away from the leaf and even still the leaf is getting less than 20 μmol/m2/s. And that is the only leaf getting any light from it.

Now let’s take a look at my setup with the 100W Sansi light (two of them, to be exact) :

I don’t need to keep the plants right up against the light (if I did, they’d be getting over 1,000 μmol/m2/s). Instead, I can keep it higher up to spread the light over a wider area. The plant collection on the right covers an area of about 5 feet x 3 feet and every leaf is getting some light. It takes a messy grow light setup and consolidates it into just one sleek light. And with the height of the light, there is plenty of room for my plants to grow.

On the left side, I do have some small plants on the ground as well as some cuttings on a tiered shelf. They’re sheltered from any light from above so I do supplement those plants with the T10 55W standing grow light (the thin black post on the left).

I like to be precise, so I went through each leaf and measured how much light they are getting. If you’re looking to do the same, be sure to get something that measures PPFD (Photosynthetic Photon Density), not just FC (foot candle). PPFD is the usable light that plants need, whereas FC are more akin to what our eyes see as light.

A second-floor porch blocks most of the sunlight from entering through the window, so the grow lights are very necessary here.

At these light levels I have been getting increasingly large secondary fenestrations and large, healthy leaves. There is only ~5-10μmol/m2/s coming in from the window at this time of day, so these readings are pretty much entirely from the grow lights themselves.

The side view shows just how far away the plants can be while still getting a ton of light:

I have the timers set for 14 hours, so they automatically turn on at 6am and turn off at 8pm. Most of my grow lights have a timer for 12 hours, so I was pretty stoked to get one with 14 hours. This might be obvious, but my goal for grow lights is to imitate the sun. Plus I really like lights up high so they won't block my view of the plants. The 100W Tall Standing Grow Light checks all the boxes for me.