florescent grow light lights

Do florescent grow lights work well? I'm thinking about setting up a area in
my basement to start some cuttings. Any info or ideas for setting up an area
would help. What worked and didn't work.

Do florescent grow lights work well? I'm thinking about setting up a area
in
my basement to start some cuttings. Any info or ideas for setting up an
area
would help. What worked and didn't work.

They work, but not that well, as they aren't terribly high-intensity.
With the plants within a few inches to a foot of the lamps, however, you'll
probably see decent results. Natural sunlight can deliver as much as 1000
watts per yard. Because the intensity of light from fluorescent diminishes
with distance, to get even a small portion of the intensity that sunlight
can deliver, you need a lot of fluorescents, and you need to be awfully
close to them.

Another option would be to use HID lighting, such as metal halide or
sodium lamps. If you're not going for large amounts of plants, you could
use a 100-watt sodium lamp instead of a shop-light. For about the same
amount of electricity, you'd be getting more light because of the higher
efficiency, and because the HID lamps produce all of the light from a very
small area, a good reflector can focus the light into a much tighter area
than a shop-light, giving you MUCH higher intensities.

steve

In article ,
bobby wrote:
Do florescent grow lights work well? I'm thinking about setting up a area in
my basement to start some cuttings. Any info or ideas for setting up an area
would help. What worked and didn't work.

An ordinary cheap shoplight with a couple of 4' tubes works well. There
are a number of alternatives now, but for decades this was all that was
available and many people had excellent success in growing house plants
and starting garden plants this way. I've started thousands of seedlings
and grown them to transplanting size using some 4' fluorescent fixtures
some friends rescued from a dumpster 25 years ago! I made a three tier
rack from wood and still use it. I'm no cabinetmaker, so it's not furniture,
but it works fine for me.

I used to recommended the cheapest tubes, cool whites, but almost all of
them are 34 rather than 40 watts now. Daylight tubes are good too. Stick
with 4' fixtures, the tubes are the cheapest because of economies of scale.

Your basement may be too cool to propagate tropical plants. One advantage
of a several tier rack is that the ballasts generate a fair bit of heat, so
plants on the tier above get some bottom heat from them. You may want to
experiment with this. Bottom heat is excellent for promoting rooting.