Sun lamp
Sun lamp
Lights an area brightly enough to grow crops.
Base Stats
- Type
- Furniture
- Mass
- 4.5 kg
- HP
- 50
Building
- Size
- 1
- Placeable
- Yes
- Power
- - 2900 W
A sun lamp provides artificial sunlight during the day. Sun lamps need to be protected by a roof, otherwise exposure to rain and snow will cause a short circuit with a fiery explosion. Selecting the lamp opens its menu which offers the option to create a growing zone around it which matches the shape of the lamp's light radius. Sun lamps automatically turn themselves off at night to save power while the plants are resting. The excess power produced during the night can be saved up by employing batteries, which is good because at 2900W, sun lamps use a great amount of power.
Light radius
A sun lamp will brightly illuminate (100%) tiles within a five-block radius. Tiles outside the highlighted area will still be illuminated, but only at 60% or less.
Greenhouses
Sun lamps let plants be grown indoors. Sun lamps don't produce heat, so temperature control devices may be required to maintain a healthy temperature for plants.
The light from sun lamps can grow plants both in the ground and in hydroponics basins. These growing areas can even be combined to collect all the output from sun lamps. For instance, on an ice sheet map, it's possible to grow ground-only crops like hay or devilstrand in the few gravel patches available while still using hydroponic basins adjacent to them, all under the coverage of the same sun lamp.
Strategy
As sun lamps consume a great deal of power, they indirectly cost your colony a lot of steel and components in turn to build the power generators needed to supply them. If you can spare the space for it, it can be worthwhile to make the walls of rooms dedicated to growing zones fed by sun lamps double-thick, so as to provide more insulation against temperature changes (and thus consume less power for heaters or coolers). This will make your sun-powered farms a little bit more efficient in the long run while keeping your plants growing through heat waves and the dead chill of winter, as well as provide more construction experience for your colonists building the walls.