LED Grow Lights

For growing plants you need to use a combination of red and blue lights. Red lights should have a frequency of around 625 nanometers and blue should be around 465nm. It also depends on the type of plants that are growing.


LED grow lights

LED plant grow lights

I have a ton of UV Led's. Could I use just UV instead of a red and blue mix?

I have been looking at buy some LED Grow lights like this: http://satandcable.com/left-categories/hydroponics/led-grow-lights

What is the best ratio of Red to Blue lights? I'm a bit confused of the options? Do I actually need any white LED lights?

5mm LEDs are used in over 95% of LED applications, making them the 'state' of the art. 1watt+ LED have made claims for over 10 years to be state-of-the-art, but are RARELY used, except in flashlights mostly, due to un-manageable thermal problems..short effective life and color shifting. Every major advance in LEDs in the last 10 years has been incorporated into 5mm tech...still LOOKS the same, but 5mms have changed the most, and are the most efficiently used, with the longest effective lifetime generally speaking for the vast majority of the lighting market...horticulture included...

If you do a 90 W<a href="http://www.ledgrowlightsoutlet.com"> led grow light </a> yourself, one 1w 660nm Red led chip bulb will cost $1-1.5 with wholesell price, bulbs only for 90w cost you about between $100-140, plus led drive and your time, that is not worthy of DIY in economic sense. You can get a decent commercial 90w UFO at $180-200 with 3 year warranty , even cheaper at ebay (no idea about quality and warranty of cheap stuff, you need to balance your invest and risk), if LED chip price goes down, led grow light and other high powerful led products have a lot of room to reduce the price, although super bright led is insanely expensive currently, it will be lower in short future. <br />

You would need 8-10 CREE or Luxeon LED emitters, along with a current controller. A good place to get LEDs like this is at www.dealextreme.com. The current controller could be as simple as a few resistors. Do you really need 2000 lumens for a single rose???

um, incandescent (filament) would work better As you know, you can't heat anything to save your life using LEDs Incandescent lights are less efficient, but they produce a wider spectrum of light If you want, you can use CFLs (compact florescent) i'm not a biochemist, and this is only my opinion (oh, and incandescent light are WAAAY cheaper to buy) don't hate my if I'm wrong : )

Could you drop a link to the commercially available LED grow-lights, which are insanely expensive? It may help to give you a better answer. L

LED's .... LED's are the up and coming efficient way of lighting! .... LED's have a long life, very efficient, and when powered correctly can produce very nice lighting. The LED is very sensitive to heat produced by electrical amperage. Most LED's use only 20 milliamps. LED grow lights or lighting panels can be found at ... www.UltraLEDLights.com ....... They custom build LED lighting and at an affordable price.

Hi, Here is a picture of our first grow test of our new Light, the LumiGrow 125. Test plant is Basil. 125 watts of power. Custom designed driver and emitter arrays. The main challenge has been thermal management. Good growth overall, but messed up the test. Turns out I am not a very good gardener. Next prototype is in construction and currently searching for a manufacturer to take this puppy retail!

We have been using LEDs with great success for the veg cycle. We are getting good growth and tight internodes using lights from WWW.solutionsgrowlights.com, at 1 1/2 blue bulb (409lumens 12watts) per sq ft. They are 110volt and screw into a regular light base. ($1.50ea base) We built a movable rack out of one x two's (wood) and mounted the bases to the rack. The bases are the type that mount on a the power cord. Home Depot has the bases. We are still experimenting with the grow cycle to get the proper amount of light and color mixture for optimum growth. But it looks promising at 25 lights on a 4x4 mixed 1/2 red and 1/2 blue. By the way you can get red bulbs in the 640 to 650 spectrum which greatly increase the usability of the light. In the mean time we are saving 80% on our electric bills. We tried building our own also and found that for $30 a bulb it was not worth the time and energy and expense. aloha

Or you could just order them completely assembled already from http://growled.se/store/

Best thing is they cost the same!

For some reason it didn't post right but that ° nonsense was supposed to be a degrees symbol.

I've got a few hours of research in to these LED grow lights and was also trying to figure out if it's more cost effective to build my own... ( I know it's the norm but I just can't justify $300 on a light :-/ )

Thanks to fellow growers (of slightly different motivation) I found an experiment here that references a few different wavelengths and ratio's of LEDs needed. Does anyone else out there have any experience with different wavelengths or can anyone recommend locations/LEDs to buy? So far the most useful search that I've found is here but the information that I'm pulling from seems kind of scarce and I hate to base my experiments off only one source's information. Thanks!

The LED’s recommended (I understand everything up the comma):
1 part 400: 25°, 40mW/sr
1 part 465: 18°, 11cd typ
4 part 630: 20°, 14cd typ
4 part 660: 30°, 4cd typ

i have some really good ideas on where to get LEDs and colours to use... i just need help putting together the most efficient driver... i'm aiming at 25w-50w per lamp with possibly different modules for vegetative and flower/fruiting stages. Maybe just one main module and an auxiliary module of reds for flower fruit... These will be at least 5 times more efficient than HID in my opinion.

I believe that is the patent i was referring to. I have a copy of it on my computer somewhere but i'll see if i can find a good link...

That was easy...
Efficient LED lamp for enhancing commercial and home plant growth
There are also some really good links to other patents under citations.

i suggest finding the Grow Master patent as it will contain full details of how their device works inculding the color mix. as long as you are not selling it you can just copy the patent (and post your plans here for others to make too)

First i want to say that, based on my research, lumens are useless when rating a light ability to stimulate plant growth. lumen is a measure of how bright a light source appears to the human eye. Our eyes are most sensitive to the middle (green) part of the visible spectrum and sensitivity decreases toward the blue and red. Plants on the other hand respond most to red and blue and little use for the middle part of the spectrum and is why chlorophyll appears green (green light is reflected not absorbed.
Unfortunately most artificial light sources are measured in the massaganistic lumen. Keep this in mind when thinkin about light source. This is one reason LED can be a great boon to agricultural/horticultural lighting. [properly driven]LEDs don't waste much energy on heat and have very narrow color spectrum thus you can use more energy in the colors plants use and omit those they tend to just reflect. That's my two cent for now.
Here's some links: (please also note that though these are red and blue grow lights, most of them do not contain optimized wavelengths for plant's production of chlorophylls)
LED Grow Lights
Groovy Grow
saLED
Grow With
Grow Master
This last link is the only LED lamp that is optimized but the LED mixture is patented and thus is most expensive. This is what i have been trying to emulate in my personal LED 'grow light' design but of course i could only make it for myself and could only market it if i made enough change to the colour mix as to not infringe on the patent (which i believe is possible while making the light more effective).

-D

State of the art LEDs are about 100lm/W, so 2000lm is about 20W worth, or about 10 3W LEDs. Lumens are probably a bad measurement to use, since they're based on eye sensitivity to green, and plants would rather not have green (they just reflect it anyway, eh?) All Electronics currently has some good deals on clusters of 1W Leds...