LED shop lights

Hi all. I was wondering if anyone has any wisdom about using LED shop lights for starting seeds indoors, rather than fluorescents.

Thanks!
Daniel

A guy came and spoke on hydroponics at our homesteading club and said he had great success using simple LED lights for growing indoors.  He said they were as good as the fancy red/blue lights or fluorescent grow lights.

6 out of 8 of the lights on my homemade seed starting stand are LED shop lights.  If remember correctly four are 3200 lumen and the other two are 4500 lumens.  My seedlings grow well under them and the only thing I really have to watch is keeping the 4500 lumen lights a little farther above the plants as I've had some leaf burn/scald by having them too close.  

I suspect that a higher colour temperature "daylight" LED (4000k) would be preferable to plants, since that's a bit more like sunlight.

But it's still a narrower spectrum compared to sunlight.

Years ago, we used a fluorescent fixture with a warm white and a cool white tube to try to get more of the spectrum. It worked rather well.

In either case, removing any covers etc. is preferable as long as it's safe, giving more direct lumens to your plants.

Great to hear, thanks for the feedback!

-D

Hi Daniel,
I used LED shop lights to start my tomatoes and peppers. It seemed to work quite well. I did not have fancy grow lights at the time to compare the growth to, but they were healthy plants in the normal amount of time (actually they were growing so fast, I had to pot them up twice before I could put them in the garden). I now have some of the fancy lights because I found them for the same price as the shop lights had purchased before. Maybe I'll have to try a side by side one of these days.

I use bright white LED bulbs with the occasional warm white LED bulb added for a more complete spectrum. I believe the fancy red/blue grow lights are more efficient since they produce light right in the range of needed by the plants, but it would take a LONG time to make up for the much higher upfront cost.

The additional spectrum added by fluorescents is ultraviolet generated from the mercury vapor and converted to other wavelengths by the fluorescent coatings..   How much of the green spectrum and ultraviolet and infrared are needed is not clearly established.  I think the idea behind using the red and blue only was to spend the electricity on the 2 spectrums most used by the plants.   As permaculture scientists it would be good to observe and record the response of different kinds of plants to the different lights.  For example New Zealand spinach makes small thick leaves in bright full spectrum light but being an understory plant makes larger tender leaves under reflected light.  
I have uncompleted plans to use a fluorescent spiral in the center of these large reflectors I have and put the LED grow strip around the edge.

I do! I do! I do!

My LED shop lights started their lives growing out plants in my old Aquaponics system. I used them for both growing out lettuce and cloning trees in there.

They have now been recycled into my massive home-made seed starting station.

I got one of the 4-tier plastic shelves from Lowes. Then used 550 cord to pull them up against the bottom of the shelf above and tied.

Since the bulbs are so low powered... I was able to daisy chain them together going down from the top. I then got a heater mat controller and attached it halfway up the shelf. I can use a mat on any of the three top shelves now.

The shop light housing I went with is 12" wide x 4' long and holds 4 T8 bulbs. Most only hold two. Be sure to get the 4ct type so you can have higher lumens.

When starting seed I physically raise them to start and lower them as they grow. Once they get taller, they either head outside to harden off.... or over to under the actual (Still cheap actually!!!) LED grow light system that is many times brighter. Things like Tomatoes and Bell peppers tend to stay inside for instance for longer grow out.

In the AP system, the lights were on pulleys and that was super useful!

I used my spectrometer to test the LED shop lights out and they had AMAZING and even light spectrum output.

Here is a link to a YouTube video I made of the old AP system. You can see that the plants were doing fine in there. Even though the water and air temps were 55F. After the first 15 days... the second cuttings of lettuce came weekly.

I will see if I still have the box so you know what bulbs I used. I went with the highest lumens I could find and 5500K color if I remember correctly.

My memory has failed me again.

I used 6500K lights. My actual grow light is in 5500K

Just dusted it off to get it ready for this photo shoot and seed starting this weekend!

About that time here!!!

I remember doing the math for power usage back when they were on the AP system.

@ $0.12 per 1kWh of power used… x the number of hours used (year round back then) to grow lettuce and root cuttings…

I think the price was a little over $100 per year to run in the Aquaponics System. It only gets used a few months a year now.