My DIY lights

cool white or warm white

 

hi, Dave here,..... light is the one issue that I'm having problems with. In my little greenhouse I have 1- 2 x fluorescent grow light fixture and the rest comes from a west facing window. I can identify with the girl who lives in New Mexico. Essentially we live in hell. Seasonally, too hot with no humidity. It is considered the beginning of winter and the afternoon Sun still burns even though it only lasts for a couple of hours. Fortunately my girls and I have been together for a while and winter brings a welcome and necessary change. Currently, 8 of them are going to spike and I am showing 13 spikes. For those of you who are working with LED lighting, could you please chime in and make a few suggestions? I would appreciate the input. Thanks

 

Any personal ideas about illumination for a 4 foot by 5 foot by 5 foot grow area?

 

Thank you

 

What am i doing wrong here? I respond to my DIY lights and I get a response I don't use lights can somebody please tell me what I'm doing wrong

 

Thank you for your response orchid boy. That showed me another avenue to go down. I noticed in the photograph on your post that it looks like there are three different colored LED lights in the same strip. Am I seeing things right? If so I haven't been able to find anything like that here in the States. Another thing is that anything associated with grow- lights is affiliated with the propagation of marijuana, which has dominated the industry lately, and the prices increase exponentially. I have found a 12 foot strip of warm white light LEDs for $70. That seems a bit much seeing as how my grow area is approximately 5 feet wide 4 feet deep and four and a half feet tall. That would only span two rows. Questions; 1) how many rows and watts would be considered a sufficient supplemental amount of light, 2)- do these light strips come plug and play 3)-any other creative, more economical alternatives? Thank you, Dave, "blestbeing"

 

Hi, Dave here again. I was wondering how many lumens per foot are those lights rated at? Are they plug and play?

 

you can get the strips from china on ebay much cheaper and use a 12 volt transformer as a driver

 

Dave, lumen/W isn't so relevant for red+blue light.

Frequently, you don't get enough information with this type of LED Tape. I think SMD 2836 based LED is the newer version with a bit higher efficiency than 5050. In this wikipedia page, they list the lm/W (for white LEDs). But actually this is a small part of the story. The design influences the efficacy a lot. For example, some T8 LED bulbs using 2836 can achieve close to 150lm/W. They achieve this, by driving the LED softly (each LED gets small amount of current) and use lots of LEDs. Obviously, this is costly to manufacture. Many of the cut-to-size LED strips have much much lower efficacy (due to the price constraints). There are several reasons why these cut-to-size LEDs have low system-wide efficiency. The white cut-to-size strips have efficacy similar to or lower than T8 or T5HO in general. But orchid boy's is red+blue, so it may be a bit better than fluorescent bulbs.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying that you can't grow plants with these. If you put enough of these, you can grow even high light orchids. It looks pretty interesting with the bamboo cover!

 

Thank you everybody for all your help and knowledge about the lights. Mickey, that's a great suggestion about China and eBay. As it so happens I happen to have three 12-volt transformers all at different amperage ratings. I am sure one will work out. As for the soldering and twisting I bought myself a little soldering gun at Home Depot. I use it for low voltage small wiring. I have already used it in the wiring for my controls and it works great. Thank you everybody

 

you might want to try higher power cfl for a small area