I want to start a grow, but i wan to do with LEDs. does anyone have any advice for me. like how many LEDs i should use. i only want to grow about 10 small plants then eliminate down to about my 3 best.
Growing with LED's is not cheap, not to start with at least. I have done some experiments with some Luxeon LED's. Results were good. However the difficulty seems to be to get an even sperad of light. the luxeon LED's really only require you to put then spaced about 1 every 10 cm or so. they get hot so you need to mount them on a heatsink or aluminium RHS or something. the problem is then that you need red and blue. the plants grow towards the blue lights, and not the red, but need the red light to grow properly, which means you have to either layout the leds so you have a blue in the middle with reds around the outside, or have the leds further away from the leaves, which is not ideal. Leds are not the best light for growing plants, but it enables you to have a very quiet grow box, with low heat output and lower electricity costs. I have not yet seen or heard anyone seriously layout the proper funds needed to create a real homemade LED grow solution. The LEDTRONICS solution looks ok but its damn expensive. You can get LUXEONS from http://www.lumiledsfuture.com/ if you are a registered company and its only a few dollars per LED. surplus laptop power surplys are a cheap way to power them. you will need some LM317 voltage redulators or something similar if you don't want to cook your expensive led setup. the alternative is to balance each led array with resistors but that can be time consuming. the problem with using a voltage redulator is that you lose efficiency as the regulator talkes at least 2v. the best way would be to use a proper current regulated switching power supply, but that gets expensive also. it really comes down to cash. so if you do some growing the old fashon way, build up some cash by doing so, and use that cash to invest into making a foolproof LED grow setup. that way it'll make you feel better about spending soo much. NOTE: Luxeons are not at the pefect wavelengths, they are slightly off, so you get about 70% efficiency from them. not that great i agree, but stuffed if I'm going to wire up 70 led's for every 1 luxuon. (thats the light output difference) and Luxeons have a much wider beam angle, which results in a smoother light output. ) Phil
Hey guys, check out this thread: http://forum.grasscity.com/general-indoor-growing/93801-led-lights-pics.html?highlight=led+grow
i also think prices will be much better in a few years. led's are only now becoming reliable and cheap.
I have yet to buy them, i want to do more research, but I found 13W 168 LED lights that are Blue: 430mn and Red: 670nm for $12 USD each out of China (sigh) for a "sample" order. On another doc it says the wavelength is: Blue:430nm-460nm Red: 650nm-680nm. I will prob. buy one 60 blue led and four 168 red led per plant. Do you think that will be overkill? It is only like 60W per plant?
Those grow bars will not work for herb. Each 5mm led puts out milliwatts of power. You need a great many to achieve at least several watts of radiant power.