Grow lights, heaters etc, on a budget

what

wowee! I am doing 500 for mum and i thaught that was a challenge.
What a brill thread!

 

Well, 3 hours later, so far nothing is melting, smoking, blazing or otherwise causing any reason to be alarmed. I can rest my hand comfortably on the heat mat, its lovely and warm but not hot. I'll switch it off before bed, and give it a few more soak tests while I'm up and about over the next few days, and assuming there are no issue, I'll get some seeds sown and put them in there within the next few days.

 

I'm officially excited.

I sowed the first load of seeds on new years day. Assorted vareities of correopsis. As planned, they all went onto the heater shelf at first. Checked today and some have germinated. That's 3 days from sowing to germination.

Today the babies have been moved up to the light section. This is the first true test of my LED panel. The new seedlings will either make a race for light and then keel over and die, in which case I know the LED panel is useless, or they'll take their time and green up and grow strong, in which case I'll invest in more LED panels to expand the lab.

 

Completely off the led light panel clueless sorry but you got my 1 brain cell thinking about stringed led lights used in the garden on plants,i know they look pretty and i have no idea on the quality some can be,could it be possible that they would benefit a plant also in spring & autumn in lower light levels maybe??? prob a dumb question

 

Doubt it Joolz. The decorative ones are much lower intensity, radiate over a much wider arc thus further reducing their effective intensity and probably the wrong bandwidth for photosynthesis, which apparently requires fairly specific red and blue bandwidths. If you look at my one from the side, it doesn't look that bright but if you look straight at it by accident (as I did very briefly) it hurts like your eyes have just been zapped out and you get funny flashy blobs in front of your eyes for a few minutes after

Its not a dumb question at all though. A few weeks ago before I started researching this, I'd have wondered the same thing.

 

I get you clueless, thanks maybe one day someone will design a hexagon shaped portable solar panel one for our garden plants
A bit like being under a hair dryer at the hdressers

 

I can just picture it. A rather drab looking flower goes under for an hour, and comes out with a massive head of pale blue curls.

 

its the future

 

On the subject of LEDs - I rewired my LED growlight on Xmas day, inbetween putting the Turkey on & nipping out to the pub:

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Thats 10 3W LEDs (7 Blue, 3 Red) stuck to a steel plate about 20" long & hung from my camera tripod. My light meter sez its putting out around 12,900 LUX 3-4" from the plate, which is about what I would expect as I get 3,800 LUX from an 11W CF tube at the same sort of distance.

Its a bit early to tell how the Blue-Red combo makes the plants grow, but I would say that the test subjects, some chillies I started at the end of last year & which have been sulking on the windowsill have started to wake up after a week of 10 hours of LED light a day - If I get a chance I will pot them on today & measure etc.

The next step is to build a proper cupboard somewhere & add a germination stage on top of the metal plate where the heat from the LEDs keeps things warm.

 

Is there not another way it can be done naturally instead like old grass etc and clear perspect for sunlight as a lid or am I talking jibberish ? lol

 

Its easy enough to get the warmth required for seeds to germinate. Its much harder to ensure they get enough light to grow properly. At this time of year, a day still has less hours of daylight than hours of darkness, and the strength of that daylight is weak because of the low angle of the sun relative to the horizon. Grow lights give us the ability to bring spring forward a few weeks as far as the seedlings are concerned, by giving them some fake sunshine.

 

Just checked on my babies. It seems the LED array is doing absolutely fine. The seedlings are still too small to really show in a pic taken with my phone (it doesn't do small things very well), but the seedlings are short, stout, and deep green as opposed to tall, thin, and white.

Looks like I'll be ordering more of those LED arrays for the back end of this year. Early indications show it to be really promising.

 

I am thinking of buying LED arrays to help grow some seedlings early to get larger plants for spring. Surely these LED lights are just coloured red and blue (plants use those spectrums from sunlight), so they are just getting light filtered through a colour? and therefore no real benefit? Suppose what I am saying is I am interested how the seedlings do in the LED arrays with time. Larger the leaf, the more sunlight required, seedlings need little light and therefore you might be getting results for now, but the light might be useless in a few months? Am also thinking of using them to over winter larger non-hardy plants, so am keen to know your experience.

 

Salamander - my understanding is that coloured LED lights are not white light that has passed through a coloured filter - which would be inefficient. The colour is intrinsic to the particular LED device. When an electron jumps from one orbit to another it gives out light that is very specific to the difference in energy levels of the orbits. So all the light comes out at a very specific wavelength (ie colour). To get another colour you have to have a different chemical composition of the LED material, with electron orbits of different values.

As a result LED's are very efficient at turning electricity into light - for most of us the determining factor is how much they cost.

Semi conductors can be very strange. I once worked with some Gallium Arsenide which gave off red light if the current passed through in one direction and blue light when the direction was reversed.

 

The LEDs in the array are clear, not coloured. Its as PeterS says, LEDs are totally different to more conventional lights.

An incandescent bulb produces light by taking a tungsten filament to somewhere close to white hot.

A flourescent tube uses high voltage to 'excite' molecules in a gas causing them to glow.

LEDs are a bit quantum. When a current passes across a junction of two semic-conductive materials, all the electrons shuffle about and rearrange themselves in the the atomic lattice, and by using specific materials, the orbits of those electrons around their atomic nuclei wobbles at a very precise frequency. When an electron wobbles on its orbit, a photon is released, which is the basic component of light. Here's where it gets head fryingly quantum. A photon is a particle, so has mass, but at the same time it is also a wave so it doesn't. In its incarnation as a wave it has very specific length depending on the amount and angle of the disruption of the electron from its orbit, and that gives us specific colour.

Or put simply, some witchery enabled someone to turn electrickery into very specific bandwidth of light without any filters, so they are extraordinarily efficient.