Viewing post #374542 by Roosterlorn

You are viewing a single post made by Roosterlorn in the thread called Extending growing season under lights.
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Mar 16, 2013 5:48 AM CST
Name: Lorn (Roosterlorn)
S.E Wisconsin (Zone 5b)
Bee Lover Lilies Pollen collector Seed Starter Region: Wisconsin
Della, that light you're looking at on ebay is suitable for kitchen, bathroom or office. It most likely consists of a string of LED's inserted into a T5 tube and designed to be an energy efficient replacement for current T5 fluorescent tubes and fits fixtures with T5 connections. SMD stands for surface mounted device, associated with 'through the hole' terminology, meaning 'inserted into', etc. But this light is not suitable for plants since it's a straight line 6500k. There would be no enhanced red or blue zone with this one.

In your first sentence, you have the 'hot ' and 'cold' colors reversed. the darker color zones are warmest, the lighter zones are the coolest Think of it this way: If you have incandescent lights with a variac control (a dimmer) you can turn down the lights to where you begin to see more of the yellows, oranges, reds and darker. A darker setting is warm and relaxing. Turn up the lights and you see the brighter, higher, cooler end of the spectrum and we, as people, associate that with lively, busy places; the kitchen, bathroom, office, etc. Color 'wheels' associated with fashion, design and paint industries would be relevant in that case.

But for plants, we want to stick with wavelengths and k values and charts or graphs; things like that.

Think of the color spectrum as a straight horizontal line (rather than a wheel). place black on one end (the left) and assign it a numerical value of zero, or '0'k. Place white on the other end and assign it a numerical value of '10000k' (arbitrary). Now you can begin to envision where the red 3000k and blue 5000k zones are. Those are the colors important to us. If you want too, you could go ahead and place all the colors on a k chart.

Keep in mind that T5 fluorescent tubes require a T5 fixture designed just for them. I can list some I'd recommend if you like. Keep in mind too, that if you go the LED route, the lighting would most likely be just red and blue--you wouldn't be watching your seedings with the same lighting you're accustomed too. LED is an area I'm not very Knowledgable with. Of, if you're worried about 6500k burning your seedings--just raise the lamp a little to decrease the intensity, but that most likely would never happen anyway.
Last edited by Roosterlorn Mar 16, 2013 7:36 AM Icon for preview

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