Mama Bear wrote:
zxcvbob wrote :

Mama Bear wrote:
Has anyone here used the Hortilux Blue MH lamps?

I have a plant stand on a south side window, the only
available window for it in this house. It gets decent
sunlight from about September through mid-April, then it
loses it.

I'm presenly using a dual F40T12 fixture to cover two shelves
of gloxinias and one kalanchoe that someone gave me, but has
never bloomed indoors due to the low light. The top shelf is
doing ok but not the bottom.

I'm thinking of switching to a 150 watt MH lamp and fixture.
I read at
http://www.futuregarden.com/lighting...ing_lamps.html that
the Hortilux Blue is supposed to be really good, but do they
make them in 150 watts? I don't think I need 400 watts, and
all that expense, I can't afford it, just to cover a couple
of plant stand shelves. ( a 4' long and maybe 14" wide area
altogether )

Does Hortilux make the Blue MH in 150 watt?

Or other cost effective suggestions for me?

Thanks!



What kind of lamps do you have in the F40T12 fixtures?
Especially in the bottom fixture. How old are the lamps?

I only have one fixture with 2 - 48" tubes. They're fairly new
lamps. One is the purple kind of tube and the other is more like
a Chroma 50. I don't want to have to take them out to look. But
these things put out in the neighborhood of 2000 lumens each and
a MH bulb, I understand, would be at least 4x that, even a 150
watt one?

I recommend changing the ballasts in your existing fixtures to
electronic ballasts for F32T8 lamps. Try to get one with a
ballast with a ballast factor (bf) greater than 1. Don't
confuse this with the power factor, which you don't care about
in this application. The new ballast will cost you about $20.

I thought of that, but T8 tubes are hard to find in grow lights
aren't they? Home Depot said all they had was FS T8's.

The 3000k lamps work great; about as good as grow lights.

I've found that plants really like Philips ALTO 830 series
F32T8 lamps, and they are cheap (like, $3 per lamp.) GE and
Sylvania also make very similar lamps. The lamps should last
over 20000 hours and unlike F40T12 lamps and MH lamps, they
retain 90% of their brightness all the way to the end.

Still, I only have that one dual tube fixture hanging from the
ceiling over the plant stand.


I thought you meant you had one fixture *right over each shelf* (that's
what I have and I start my peppers and tomatoes and flowers under them
every year)

Bob