Growlights/Box

I have read all of the posts that I could find relating to grow lights/box until my eyes were twitching.
1st year for growing seeds and already I have learnt 2 things. 1. When you plant say 50 seeds you do not necessary get 50 plants come up, so plant more than you need, give surplus to friends.

2. When my seedlings germinated the single window in garage did not provide enough light and they started to lean towards the light and would have got leggy. I had to build a small folding table for conservatory and once in there they started to grow straight.
Mind you I think I started in perhaps what was the dullest & cold spring for a long time so may be better next year!!!!!

Hence my thoughts went to a light box for next year to assist the plants I cannot get into conservatory. At the moment it is all about growing seeds for annuals & now veggies. With a light box more possibilities open up.
For me it is all about germinating the seeds and then getting them strong enough to transplant into pots and then into the greenhouse so florescent tubes seem best. I think I would start off with 2 x 2ft grow lights boxes rather than one 4ft as they would be more versatile.

A couple of pointers if you do not mind. I am sure it was Kristen who said :-
“After 2 days take propagator lid off and a further 2 days take them off heat” sorry Kristen if it was not you.

PeterS wrote:- “I have a double sized heated propagator inside the box, with a lid. If I totally remove the lid everything dries out very quickly - so most of the time the lid is on”
I did read that with small plants just germinated you take lid off to stop damp getting to plants and mildew setting in. PeterS do you mean larger stronger plants the lid stays on plants not babies??

“There are however ventilation slots on top of my lighting unit and when repositioned my thermometer there I got a reading of 95°F, so it would appear there could be a build up of heat from an unventilated homemade lighting unit, but the one I've got lets heat out through the unit itself”
Scrungee
Not as yet looked at providing ventilation slots in top/sides of grow box but would one or two of these be ideal for providing ventilation as you can control the amount of ventilation you need/have??


Not yet decided whether to buy or make the light boxes as sometimes cost is not a lot of difference. Luckily I have an electrician friend who if his suppliers got what I need can get my stuff at trade prices. I see they have much stronger LED panels on ebay now, 120watts but still only 1ft square and around £70 odd.Florescent T5 tubes seem to be the way to go for me at the moment.
I must have seen it somewhere but read so much yesterday I may of missed it. Do I buy daylight tubes , Extra Warm White , Warm White , Standard White , Cool White .Did not know there were so many variations of tubes , I believe from what I read that for early stages of growth white/blue spectrum of light is needed. Would the standard florescent tube provide this or a special tube be better.
Thanks for reading my extended posts and look forward to any replies.
Peter

 

I suspect you will get many different opinions on this one, but my home made LED growlight has done great things this year - all my Chillies & Toms started life under it, the resulting plants are the best Ive ever managed; bushy & compact.

I used 10 1W LEDs stuck to a metal plate & hung from my spare camera tripod over my (large) heated propagator - I think for next year I will make a slightly bigger one with a few more LEDs on & get a couple of cheap reflective blankets to cut down on the (purple) light escaping out into the street...


--
... I do live on my own so I can get away with this sort of thing ...

 

Hi OxfordNick,I expect you will get different opinions but the point is,it is working for you and is well worth experimenting like you are.It is the sort of thing I would love to play with as in the end not a lot of bucks spent and a bit of fun to do.Where may I ask did you get your Led`s? I presume you get the purple colour by having blue + red led`s?
I had a very quick look and I see various places sell led`s and also you can get them in 3 watts as well. Again presuming to make a permanent stable base you could buy a dedicated LED circuit board or a normal circuit board.No idea if one would be better than the other but worth reading into.I just had another quick look and 10 x 3watt blue Led`s would cost £5.40.From what I read it is not so much the colour the Led looks when not on but the spectrum of light it gives out.Now I have no idea on this without some research ,did you do some research or just buy blue & red lights??
Peter

 

I used an LED array for mine, and it worked very effectively. Don't make the mistake I made though. I got too carried away and started a little production line system going, alternating trays between the grow cabinet and windowsills. I did all this too early, or I bit off more than I could chew, because it meant that my seedlings didn't get enough light. The cabinet was providing enough light for everything in it, but as I had to many to go in, I ended up with a tray spending only one night in 4 in the cabinet. Not enough, and I lost loads and loads of seedlings.

Next time I'm doing a bigger grow cabinet. That'll sort it.

 

Best of luck Trogre - they are great fun.

I think there are lots of different approaches - all of which will work. In my case, I followed a few principles:-

1) Remember - the object is to create the same temperatures and light levels that you would get in summer. So I just use white light, that is closest to summer light. But then in summer the light levels can vary with cloud and time of day etc - so I just used the standard cheapest fluorescent tubes. They work brilliantly. You need a high light level, and if you are really keen you can buy a light meter - about £20. My box produces about 10,000 lux (the relavent light measure) which is produced by three 3 foot fluorescent tubes (90 watts in all) over a growbag tray measuring about 6 inches below the tubes. However I also overwinter plants in my house at a level of 500 lux. which is meant to just keep them alive. The plants still grow and sometimes flower. So there is a lot of leeway.

2) Cost. Given that plants tolerate a range of conditions anyway - I spend as little money as possible. LED's are the future, but currently I feel they are more expensive to buy and only about the same to run.

3) As a hobbyist, I am not interested in the last 10% of efficiency. So even if special expensive tubes do work (and I am not convinced about that) I am happy with my cheap set up. The same goes for expensive compost, feed, propagators, and designer clothes etc as well.

4) In order to keep the heat up I often grow my seedlings for some time in a closed propagator - sometimes till they are 2 or 3 inches high or too big for the propogator. I am sure its wrong, but as long as the plants thrive I am not worried. But you must take the top off every day to change the air. The bulk of a plant comes from using carbon dioxide from the air and this will become exhausted in a closed environment. I have been lucky and very rarely lose anything once its germinated. But getting seeds to germinate is another matter - especially if they are more exotic seeds that need to be fresh - but often aren't.

Remember, you can germinate a lot of seeds in a small space, but they will soon need potting up and will take up much more space. I grew some Cobae scandens for the first time this year. They were in the house and 6 feet high before it was warm enough to put them outside.

 

Sounds like me

I think PeterS raised a very important point. I have had a Metal Halide grow-lamp for 3 or 4 years, and added a T5 (fluorescent tubes) lighting rig this year - I needed more lit growing area, and thought I would try tubes and compare the two. One of the biggest problems I have is with the compost surface, in the seed trays, drying out; I'm contemplating some misting nozzles to combat that, but I suspect that LEDs may actually be the answer. I prefer not to have the propagator lids on as that will "steal" some of the benefit of the lights.

I am inclined to think that Meta Halide has less drying effect on the compost surface than T5. My MH lamp is 400W, so chucks out a huge amount of heat, but its 2 feet from the plants, so the heat dissipates and is less intense by the time it reaches the plants (however, it does have the useful side effect of heating the area around the plants, as my lamp + plants are in an enclosed space). I think that because the T5 lights need to be just an inch or two from the plant that, even though the tubes are only "warm", that the drying effect on the compost surface may be greater. Next year I will try LEDs as I think they will provide to be even better.

By the by, I think Metal Halide and T5 cost about the same. Capital cost (give or take any Special Offers that you might find) per unit area, and running cost (i.e. Watts consumed per unit area) is much of a muchness, so doesn't enter into the buying criteria as much as how suitable the lamp / lighting rig is for the purpose you need it for.

Now my MH lamp is in a small plastic tunnel, which is erected inside my (frost free) conservatory. It provides additional light during the night, and some heat too



the plots are a bit misleading, but:

Blue = Conservatory (main part)
Red = Tunnel inside conservatory
Green = Second part of conservatory (gets the sun earlier)

Misleading because: the "green" part of the conservatory is definitely less hot in the middle of the day, so I suspect that the sensor is in direct sun and over-reading. The "red" sensor is close to the light, so representative of the temperature for plants directly under the light. I have tried the sensor at the edges of the "tunnel" and it reads 4C or 5C warmer than the Conservatory itself, which has meant that I can maintain 10C during April when the conservatory itself was falling to 5C-ish.

Now you are losing it Peter!! How could you lump Designer Clothes, which are a complete waste of money, in with expensive compost, feed, propagators which are just a basic necessity?

You are SO spot-on with that comment. I have a number of 1/4 sized seed trays divided into 3 or 4 "zones" with different seed sown in each. Different varieties of, for example, Delphinium from different suppliers have been sown at the same time, obviously have identical heat, light, water as their neighbours, and some have completely failed to germinate, others have had just one or two, and some have come up as a "forest". What to do?

 

Was at work yesterday & suffering a bit from brain fade making my memory fuzzy.

I used 3W LEDs- these ones:

http://www.rapidonline.com/Electronic-Components/3w-3-3v-Blue-Power-LED-30lm-55-2011
http://www.rapidonline.com/Electronic-Components/3w-2-5v-Red-Power-LED-80lm-55-2007

Mounted on a bit of steel I saved from the skip at work using these bases to allow the heat to dissipate:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_trksid=p3984.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0&_nkw=LED Aluminum Base&_sacat=0&_from=R40

Dont underestimate the heat these things push out when on 9 / 10 hours a day, you do need something to soak that up otherwise you just burn out your LEDs.

Then all you need is some wire & a power block to drive them all - I used one of these:
http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/constant-current-led-drivers/7002472

- Cheaper options are available from China if you have the time to wait; some people use PSUs from PCs, you just need something that can provide enough output power at the correct voltage for the number of LEDs you have. The one I used is rated to 36W, so can drive up to 12 3W LEDs in series.

I can take no credit for this, there was a useful thread on Chillis Galore forum which listed the parts; cant find that one any more but this one is interesting as it talks a lot about the different colour LEDs & what they do, in my case I used 8 blue & 2 red which seems to work well for me. I have had none of the problems with sickly leggy plants which in the past have been making early germination of things a problem.

I have no doubt that cheaper options are available, as are more sophisticated ones - the high power CF growlamps look nice, but I enjoyed fiddling with the LEDs, its quite satisfying to build something to do what you want. Those LEDs are really powerful, enough to worry me that I might get a visit from the local drug squad if they spotted the purple glow from the back room so some sort of box to contain the light for next year is probably a good idea!

As for germination - tricky stuff that needs more heat than my bog-standard heated prop will produce gets started on a reptile heat mat in the cupboard with the boiler ; pretty much everything has been started on that this year, mostly chillies & tomatoes but I've done some other stuff like a dozen banana plants from an ebay seller - Last week I started some french beans & as a test put 12 on the reptile mat & 12 not on it - the heated ones are up in 4 days whilst the unheated ones are just starting to appear now. Im going to have to think about something similar to go out in the greenhouse for next year I think.

 

I've got a reptile mat in a plastic "oddments tidy box". Seeds (Banana and the like) in sphagnum moss get too hot if they are in contact with it (running it on a thermostat) ... so I have now put a mesh cake stand between reptile mat and bags of moss/seeds.

But I think a better solution might be to just use a timer for the heat mat. I have another with a soil thermostat and I don't think it is coming on hardly at all now ... whereas I think a 15 minutes on - 15-off timer would give a boost to soil temperature, over air, which might help with germination for things that like a bit of boost. But I'm just hypothesising.