Artificial lights

I have seen some information on them and I have not been convinced. Right now I use a simple 4 foot long florescent fixture and can make my Wanderingng Jew as purple as can be.

I would recommend looking into some T8 and T5 florescent fixtures. They are very small, very efficient and you can get a lot of good plant growing bulbs for them. Try to find bulbs in the 5500-7500 Kelvin range and you will be set. Plant grow bulbs are fine too but you will often have a very hard time finding the Kelvin ratings. Even if you do find the information it is often so different for each company that it can be misleading.

If you can not find them, look for aquarium lighting. They have DIY power compact florescent lighting which will give you a TON of light for a lot of plants with a lot less bulbs than regular flourescents. Be careful though, PCF do get hot, a lot hotter than regular flourecents.

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.