Artificial lights

I hate to come off as a gun slinger on my first post, but I build high powered LED fixtures as a hobby and we've already started converting to LED in the Reef keeping hobby.

Trust me, corals are far more light demanding than houseplants, and if I can replace a 400watt metal halide with LEDs then I can ignore T5's and T8's.

One big problem - I build my own LED lights. Right now Japan is the only country using LED widee-scale commercially for plant growth, and they aren't saying much because of their competition with china. Also, most of the LED growth lights you see on the market are under-powered / over priced junk markteted towards dope growers with too much red light. The lights I build for my own reef tanks and house plants emit 10-100x the growth spectrum and cost half as much to build.

If anybody wants to measure PAR (photosynthetic active radiation) with my 20watt blue LED bars -vs- T8s or T5s be my guest. Plus, I don't have to change my LEDs like fluorescent tubes and just hope the phosphor mix is the same.

Also note that NASA is planning on using LEDs for spaceflight. Go ahead - Google it.

Also, plants require either blue light, or far red light, or a combination of both. They don't want green, nor yellow or UV. The kelvin rating used for fluorescent tubes is ambiguous and doesn't tell you what it's growth potential is, and yet almost all fluorescent lights waste energy emitting green and yellow and often 400-450nm which is of little value to a plant. Same with HID

So, the answer is, LEDs are awesome in my experience for growing plants and more efficient than any other technology. Here in Michigan where daylight also suffers 8months out of the year I'm not waiting for Chinese manufacturers to solve the problem for us. They already make enough junk - I build them myself.

3 weeks? I want your soil recipe and a bunch of your seeds! It takes 2 months here even in good potting soil and direct sunlight for me to grow lettuce of any kind to a harvestable size.

Please tell us what brand of bulb you are using and other specifics. Looks like a pretty big bulb, only ones I have found like that in a good growing spectrum were $125 each or more.

I may have to eventually switch over to LED lighting but not until I can do it on the same scale as flourescents for a respectable price. In 6 years I have spent a little over $60 for both my fixtures and my bulbs. I can grow a lot of vegetation under them.

Last time I did my price checking I could build a complete setup to light 10 full sheets of plywood full of plants for less than $300. When LEDS get to a price closer to that, maybe $500 I will have to consider changing my future plans. But last time I checked it was gonna be well over $2,000 to light that setup. Of course if I put it off much longer LEDS will be obsolete. Mr. Green