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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. |
#2
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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. 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 |
#3
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florescent grow light lights
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. |
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