Start-up costs.
They already had the big-ticket item-the primo plant-so then it was a matter of hardware.
The biggest item was a house.
The selection of which was tricky, because it’s not so much the house, it’s what they had to put in the house. Marijuana, yes, thank you-but to grow the marijuana required, among other things Grow lamps.
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.
Oh, they’ll take the money (natch), but they’ll also drop a dime.
(The only dime to slip through their grasping grubby greedy fingers.)
Anyway, the grow house would need more power and would need that power secretly, so there were two ways to get it.
Steal it-which is a matter of drilling little holes in the meter (Google it), but the Gambino family is safer to steal from than the electric company, and Ben had a moral objection to theft.
(“You can’t steal from thieves,” Chon argued.
“They are responsible for their karma,” Ben countered, “I for mine.”
“Can we get ice cream?” O asked.)
So the alternative was a generator.
This was not cheap-the generator needed to power a thousand-plant grow room cost between $10K and $20K and it MADE NOISE
A lot of freaking noise
It practically screamed “Hey, there’s a grow house in here! Hey! HEY!!!! ”
So if they put that generator in the backyard, the neighbors were going to come over-and not to invite them to a cookout. They might have been able to assuage one or two of them with some homegrown product, but it was a drop-dead guarantee that one of the neighbors was going to make the call, not to mention some black-and-white happening to cruise by and hearing that thing rumbling “probable cause.”
No, they had to put that generator down in the basement, and how many basements were there in Southern California?
Some.
Not many.
Ben and Chon went house hunting.