Hey everyone I was thinking one day when I was smoking... and I thought what if you could put solar panels under your lights within your plants... now I dont know if the solar panels would generate enough electricity from the lights but if they could you could just have the solar panels generate the power for your lights so you wouldn't run up the electric bill!!! but then again i haven't researched into it yet so i was just wonderin what all you guys ... and ladies thought about it!!! sorry about the pic it was just kinda a rough sketch on paint...
well logically solar panels are far from 100% efficient (since nothing can be 100%... yeah yeah yeah) so there would be no way to possibly power your lights off of your lights, but it might help supplement your current electricity situation, but highly doubtful. my .02
Dude. Solar panels are inefficient as mentioned. But when you take away the sun (you know, the whole... solar.. thing) they go to all shit. You want light reaching your plants, not some panels. I mean, unless you want to power I dunno... a wall clock in your grow room?
You want to capture the energy from your lights and use it to run your lights? So a perpetual energy machine? Wow, Albert Einstein and Newton would love to know how you do that. No it won't work. First, the solar panels will cost way too much. Second, they are designed to capture energy from the sun, which puts out about 10,000 lumens per square foot, your light will never put out that kind of energy. Third, there is always energy lost in such a closed system -- the lamp turns some of the energy it uses into heat, some of the light goes to your plants and not the solar panels, laws of physics dictate that the panels cannot be 100% efficient, etc. Sorry, there is no free ride.
You would do a lot better by putting your solar panels outside and letting that energy supliment your grow lights. But if you're going to do that, you might as well explore some real alternative energy sources. They're doing amazing things with wind turbines and fuel cell technology these days.