sonnylightled.com » 2009

SonnyLight featured in Farmington News Article

sonny — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:35:36 +0000

Pagosa Springs inventor to debut

LED grow light for indoor gardening

By Christine Rasmussen, Colorado correspondent

PAGOSA SPRINGS Just more than a year ago, Leo Hayes started germinating an idea that had been floating around his head since his days as an automotive technologist an LED grow-light system.

“When I was a technologist for an international company, I had to read a lot about laser technology and LEDs (light-emitting diodes),” Hayes recalled. “I read a lot about what NASA was doing to be able to provide fresh food to their astronauts.”

Thirteen months ago Hayes gave the concept his full focus, working with a partner in Taiwan to finalize product design and basic financials for Sonnylight, LLC, which is aims to release the LED Kitchen Garden, a countertop unit, and the LED Grow Garden, a hanging unit, by the end of November.

As director of product engineering at Mitsubishi Motors, Hayes gained a solid technical background and made close contacts in the international industrial-design world, which proved useful as he was fine-tuning the Sonnylight product.

“Plant action is very specific in how much chlorophyll or keratins they produce and how they react to light,” Hayes explained.

By working with a master gardener and reading a lot of research from university agriculture departments on the effect of light, Hayes formulated what he called “pulse-point modulation.”

“We manage how much power we put into each one of these (colors),” he said.

Sonnylight advantages

Sonnylight product has a CPU in it, with “Grow Logic” software. “This helps drive the germination process, because it’s more concentrated light,” Hayes said. “In the right conditions, you can get up to three times the growth rate, but a lot of that depends on the person what nutrients you give it, what’s the soil base, temperature. We provide the light.”

Standard grow-light systems with compact fluorescents can use up to 40 watts, according to Hayes. “We’re using 15 watts, and we use specific light wavelengths; LEDs have exact wavelengths based on the chemical composition of the diode. In our case we’re using two blues, two reds, and for lettuce, cabbage and kale large-leaf plants we add a bit of green.”

Plants do their best growth in four narrow light spectrums and only use about 8 percent of the white light, Hayes said. Sonnylight colors correspond with plants’ three growth stages: germination, growth and budding.

“If you don’t have sufficient blue light, the plant won’t germinate properly, so we modulate the amount of light from each different colored diode,” he said. “Then, once it starts to vegetate or grow, it switches over to the grow phase; it’s all computer controlled.”

The grower sets the lights according to five phases: daytime, sunrise and sunset, and 15-minute powering-up and dimming-down periods. “Plants are interesting because they have to have time to shut down and start up in the photosynthesis process,” Hayes said. “People grow all the time without that, but this gives options for a more natural process with the plants.”

Consumers stay involved in the process by monitoring the amount of nutrients in the water and the amount of water. “The whole product is self-contained you just turn it on, set it and take care of plants. Fifteen years is the lifetime of the lights the life of the product. This is not intended to be a service item.”

Staying true to its tag line “Modern Technology Organic Sensibility,” all packaging is biodegradable and the hood will be wrapped in a natural cotton shopping bag. Optional accessories for the product will include a heat pad, an off-grid cable for hooking up a Sonnylight to a car battery, two different soil types, and heirloom seeds that reproduce the same kind, so growers can save seeds.

“Consumers can save seeds, or replant them right away; time is not an issue here, as long as you keep them warm,” said Hayes.

“If we can help people have a bit more personal control in their lives and control what they eat there’re all these scares in the media about food that is what we want.”

The business process

Getting Sonnylight products, which have design, technology and global patents pending, to market was a learning process for Hayes. “I can do the technical side, but the whole business structure is a little out of my comfort zone,” he admitted. With help from the Next Level Leading Edge class, Hayes started building the business plan in the fall of 2008.

“The class really helped a lot it kept me disciplined,” he said. “I found that (designing) the product was easy compared to everything else.”

The discipline paid off as Hayes’ business plan won first-place in the class. “The good thing that came out of this was that I started surrounding myself by people with business experience,” said Hayes, who gave a presentation to the Southwest Colorado Small Business Development Center’s Business Advisory Group and received counseling from Bart Mitchell, former director of the Archuleta County Economic Development Association, Fort Lewis College marketing professor Simon Walls and SBDC director Joe Keck.

“Launching a product is kind of anti-climactic you work so hard on each step,” Hayes said. “It is kind of fun to think about (the response), but the focus has to be on the steps. It’s going to go where it’s going to go; all I can do is facilitate it.”

Although reticent about it, Hayes has reason to be optimistic: Sonnylight’s first magazine advertisement garnered more than 600 inquiries.

For more information: www.sonnylightled.com

Congratulations on a great product and website!!

sonnywannabe — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:45:16 +0000

‘Sonny’,

What a fabulous product! I visited the website and everything looks very attractive.

Thank you for the tour of your new green ‘great’ house in Pagosa.

Everything should flourish all winter long!

May God’s favor be piled high for the new release!!!

J.Reed – Meadow Vista, California

Welcome to Sonny’s World!

sonny — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:37:44 +0000

All inventors have crazy hair—or should. Most every child knows this ought-to-be fact. That and inventors live in basement laboratories and they only come out in order to be late for dinner. Imagine my surprise then, when Sonny Hayes, inventor extraordinaire, turned out to be a regular fellow with friendly eyes a warm smile. He wore leather work gloves, a bandana, and had been preparing his barn for a delivery of hay to his small ranch in Southwestern Colorado. Was this the same man that had implemented NASA research into a revolutionary LED grow light system?

As much as I might have hoped he had a sinister twin scheming in the attic, the same man who tended his horse and fed the piglets also had a knack for creatively filling a need—with much more than bailing wire and duct tape. The whole time I sat and listened to Sonny explain his invention, I couldn’t help but thinking to myself, “If I had one of these, I’d still have my basil plant!”

But how in the world did a man like Sonny, who spends time each day feeding cows and pigs and horses, manage to invent such a device? Did he really have a high-tech secret lab in his basement? The answer, as it turns out, comes from his background in the Japanese automotive industry. Yes, you heard me. I don’t think I could have imagined a stranger story.

In short, man with type-A personality follows his father’s footsteps at age 18, works up the corporate ladder, finds himself a successful corporate executive, and after 25 years has an operation on his appendix which takes him out of the game for several months. And apparently this break did more than heal his body. Call it epiphany, awakening, or a simple reevaluation of life. After the rush of the corporate scramble left him somewhat unsatisfied, Sonny wondered if a simpler approach to life might be more meaningful.

After several years of shoveling pig and cow dung, growing his own crops, and gathering eggs, Sonny felt that his choice had been a good one—but regarding vegetables…there had to be a better way to grow them at 8,000 feet above sea level in the short growing season of southwest Colorado (where the final frosts last into June and the first might come in early September). Grow lights seemed an appropriate answer—but the inefficiency of these huge, hot lamps almost seemed more hassle than help. There had to be a better, more efficient way to start off his crops in early spring without exposing them to the drastic mood swings of mother nature.

Now any other man might wonder this (especially if there’s Scottish blood in him), shrug, complain to his neighbor at the next community potluck, and go on hoping the frosts won’t come for another two weeks. But not Sonny Hayes. He recollected an article regarding NASA experimentation with LED grow lights during his days as a corporate research developer and thought something along the lines of, “Hey, it’s not space, but Colorado’s close enough.”

And so the inventor within obsessed night and day with the idea, and Sonny went for days without eating, scribbling notes and making midnight phone calls to contacts in Japan and forgetting to shave and cut his hair…or so I would like to imagine. Instead his creativity led him practically, pragmatically, and quietly to develop this remarkably efficient and effective in-home grow light and fill a need for those gardeners in the mountains southwestern Colorado—or anyone living north of Wisconsin, or those in a city apartment complex building without a good plant window, or…well, the list seems to keep growing.

Indeed, Sonny Hayes has come up with nothing short of a revolutionary product for those with restricted or inhibited growing conditions. This man with the leather work gloves and a shining joy for life in his eyes as he shoos chickens and bucks hay bales is as real a man as you’ll find on this good earth. And just so happens to be an inventor—even without the secret basement laboratory and the crazy hair.