Earlier this year, I did a post about some plant/seedling stands that I built with some extra oak strips I had laying around. At the time, I had cobbled together some lights out of standard household LED bulbs, which I was going to do a post about. I may still someday, but it will be an upcycling post for old bulbs. Since then I found these lights, which are a little cheaper, more powerful, and significantly easier to install. I had a decent year at work, so I also bought these lights to hang above the stands, and I've been very impressed with both.
For the strip lights, I wanted to hang two per shelf, so first thing to do was a little math. Two light strips per shelf will divide each shelf into three sections, so I divide my overall width by 3.
I want to move my lights out towards the edges of the shelf just a little bit, to try to compensate for the lack of overlap at the edges. I don't have the time to learn how to engineer this out right now, so I'm just going to move them in 1/4". My math came out to 11 3/4", I'm marking 11 1/2" from each edge. The lights are just held on by clips, which are secured by a single screw, so getting the marks perfectly centered isn't that important. The individual strips hardly weigh anything at all, my second favorite feature of LED lighting (my most favorite feature is the low power consumption). If my 'trust your gut' engineering turns out to be horribly flawed, the lights will be easy to move.
As always with hardwoods (it's a good practice generally), I pre-drill the holes for my screws. As I said, exact center isn't very important for these, so I just eyeball somewhere near center on my marks. Of course, I didn't take a picture of just the clips.
You can see the clip (barely) in the picture below, but you can definitely see the light! These things are bright enough to keep well above the plants, which was another reason for the upgrade. All of my previous light systems had to be kept within about 4" of the tops of the plants, which requires adjustment of the plants and lights about every 3 days. That's a lot of unnecessary work just to grow some things indoors!
The new lights hanging from the top are so bright they didn't even want to be photographed. They are simply hung from hooks screwed into cheap drywall anchors in the ceiling. I installed the hooks and anchors (which came with the lights) completely by hand, with no tools at all, using the threads on the hooks to 'drill' out the holes for the anchors. The lights and cords together weigh less than a pound. To give you some perspective on how fast this tech is evolving and dropping in price, these two lights are replacing an LED flood-type light bulb that I bought last year for $35. I had to buy the clamp fixture you can see in the lower right of the picture below, just shy of another $10. For about the same price, the two new lights were easier to hang, cover more area, and give about twice as much light to all of that area, from a greater distance. They also weigh less, together, than just that single old LED floodlight bulb.
Just 3 years ago these lights (if I could find them) would have probably cost me over $500, and I was scavenging old 4' fluorescent light fixtures trying to coax a little life out of my poor plants. The four tubes you see in the picture below used 20 more watts than my 6 new light strips, covered a little less than half the square footage, and put out half as much light, if I could keep the plants this close. From over 6" away, they only deliver about 10% as much light to my plants. On top of that, this fixture and ballast, with the light bulbs, weighs about 30 lbs., which is more than one of my entire new stands, with the lights.
My only real complaint with these new lights is that they work a little too good. They were too much for the thyme I had on the stands, and we actually lost one of them. The parsley, seen on the left in the picture below, is getting taller than I have ever seen parsley get. The avocados, however, seen center and right, are both absolutely loving it. The top 3 leaf sets on the big one have all grown since installing these lights just over a month ago. Our sage, in the back, is growing better under these lights than it does outside, and I'm thinking of setting up a special shelf for sage in the basement.
All of these rosemary, jade tree, aloe, and Christmas cactus cuttings have been thriving. I'm hoping this will be a bit of game changer in our ability to start cuttings through the winter.
Even the decorative peppers went through another flower and fruit cycle. The big rosemary has already grown more just since we brought it in than it did all last fall and winter. I didn't get any pictures of the lemon trees yet, but they're continuing to grow as if the summer never ended.
Of course, the real test, and the one I'm most excited about, will be to see how the seedlings handle them. Onions and loofahs will be getting started in about a month, so hopefully I can let you know in a little more than a month.
Until then, I hope you got something out of this. If you've been looking for indoor grow light solutions, this is the best deal I've been able to find. If you can find a better one, let me know! I hope you're all well, and I hope you keep enjoying this more useful, less political side of my posting compulsions!
