Led grow lights recommendations.

Some mylar sheet for the lights, impressed with the quality quite sturdy.

 

Be fery careful, the cheap chinese ones do not emit enough light, and they use a cheap metal wire, not copper wire like we sre used to. I use a professional lighting system by Telios, these are guarenteed for 50,000 hours, and mixed spectrum lights. So for germination the light is placed 1m above soil level, for compact green growth 90 cm above the growth, and 80 cm to promote flower bud, with built in UV to keep bacteria to a minimum.
Telios have just launched a new unit a 6 light unit, that covers 2m square, that costs £299, and the benefit of Telios lights are you can buy a link kit for £7, so you can run up to 12 units from 1 plug. I use a larger version in the nursery. Top tip, check out auction houses that deal with police, left property, confiscated and liquidated stock, I managed to buy some of my units for £65 from such auctions after police confiscate them from people caught growing cannabis with them, when these units cost £700 each brang new.

 

Afraid we are a bit lazy these days compared to your diy construction.
We just use one of these £10 4x2ft grow tents for seeds and cuttings etc and it later doubles up as a cold frame outside for hardening off the plants.

Only expected it would last one season but its been going of 3 years so far and still seems good.

 

@Cuttings some don't have the money to spend on anything but bargain items. Mine are perhaps very low range and work extremely well. Budgets count, particularly when you're new to the game. The 4x 48" and 2 x 24" ballasts that hold my grow Led's are at the cost of $200 CDN total, got me started. And I could only afford one area at a time. So half that price each time. Then I branched out to buying strips and setting them up myself and I run them direct from DC power. No conversion waste. Each to their own

 

I agree, if you purchase units that are made for the EU market, they have to conform to safety standards with the wiring, my warning was to the cheap chinese lights on Amazon and Ebay, with the cheaper wire, they have overheated and caused fires, so its a bit of a lottery, I should have been clearer.

 

@Cuttings thanks for the input, I can't foresee a situation where I would need a professional/expensive setup, I'm only sowing a few seed varieties and as i get the plants I want I think cuttings is the way to go so probably less seed sowing as i go along. What I have is for a few extra hours light per day I just couldn't justify any big outlay for that, I'm sure I'd go with something like yours if I had the volume of plants.

 

@mazambo you have an ideal situation. I would only be using the lights for a few hours to prolong the day too if I had some place to put the plants where they would get good daylight. Unfortunately, I've only got space in the cellar so I run my lights (which are Canada Standard Approved CSA) during the evening and night when the power rates are lower. Once of these days I'll get around to hooking them into my battery/solar panel array. And in a couple of months, it will be warm enough to start heating the greenhouse and then I won't need them at all

Let us know how you do with your strings - those are essentially what is in most of the fancy ballasts.

 

I'm using some of the Chinese LED lights and they do make a difference. They are supporting various aeonium seedlings, Ensete ventricosum and greenovia seedlings. All are doing well. Ensete seedlings will die without sufficient light so they are topping up the daylight.

I intend to buy some quality grow lights and use to propagate on racking once I can reclaim the racking. Undecided as to what to buy as prices range vary greatly. Lots of research needed to understand what the extra money buys.

 

Because they don't 'waste' energy producing the amount of heat as T5s.

But I rely on that heat to keep sensitive plants warm in (and above) my greehouse growlight box, and have the greenhouse heater on a lower setting, saving on heating a relatively empty greenhouse early in the season.

 

@JWK - some readings from our little seed tray sized heated propogator, using these 30cm led units rated at 6w (12v @ 1/2amp).

30cm tube at 150mm depth 8,000 Lux, at 300mm depth 3,000 Lux.

Sunlight at 11am though house doubleglazing 75,000 Lux
though greenhouse 10mm polycab twinwall 55,000 Lux
direct sunlight over 100,000 Lux

While the leds Lux figures look very low , they do seem to make a good improvement to the young plants growth.
Have also used them on the aquarium for a few months and they give much better plant growth than the aquarium led lighting unit that came with the tank.


Lux Meter , ebay cheapy similar to this




8520 Led Tubes 30 or 50cm about £3 each




Leds on for 10 hours a day


Fuchsia cuttings now 2 weeks old. - not a single one lost so far

 

Plus, if seedings are in small cells they require constant monitoring to prevent they drying out and getting frazzled, especially around edges of cell trays. The bigger the growlight box, the more chance of underwatering something.

 

We made up a temperatute controller for the greenhouse, 4c min, propogator 20c, and heated bench 10c, so that helps avoid such overheating, though we still do a quick check daily whatever the weather.

With such strong lamps think overheating will always be problem, but it could be overcome by using a small pc type of fan to draw in cool air into the enclosure once it hits a preset maximum temperature.

A simple solution is to use on of these popular £10 controller modules *which once they have reached the max temp will switch off the heating, if used, and then switch on the cooling, say to a small fan.
* check the type you buy has both cooling and heating, some are heating only

We also attach a string to the greenhouse auto roof vent, so as it opens it also opens the lid and side vent on the little orchid enclosure which really helps keep it cool,