I'm learning from this thread.
I've been charged with replacing an assortment of succulents that did not survive a combination of transplanting and too much bug control. A guy at a store told us being next to a window won't cut it, you need dedicated lights. He recommended marshydro.com for a fixture. Even though those prices look decent for what you get I still think I can make something as good or better for less money.
Depends on where you are in the US. I've lived my whole life in the northeast, and several years ago I moved a bit farther north. I still can't quite see Canada from my house, but it's a lot closer.
Most succulent plants won't survive freezing temperatures in the first place, and the ones that do grow are typically small. I was in California for the first time for work and was amazed to see huge succulents all over the place, and huge cacti just growing in yards like normal decorative bushes. Nothing like some extra sunlight and warm weather to help with that.
With inadequate light, growth will be stunted, or else the plant will be long and spindly as it tries to stretch toward the dim light, and the colors will usually be a boring green. Most of these things evolved under constant exposure to very bright light. The leaves on one variety I have are covered with a fuzz that helps
reduce the amount of light beating down on the leaves. Others live mostly underground, with only the windowed tips of the leaves showing above ground to let light into the interior of the leaves for photosynthesis.
The red-orange one on the left in this photo was a standard green when I bought it, due to low ambient light in the store.
Everything seems to be doing alright under my lighting array. I still might add a pinch of IR and UV to the mix, but I don't know if they're needed, or exactly what wavelengths to use.
It's amazing how far this stuff has come in a relatively short amount of time, I decided to hit youtube to check out testimonials not too long ago and the indoor set ups people have now are just unreal.
Plasma lights? Holy crap! I'm from the 'get ready for spring with 2 shop lights' school.
With all the R&D money getting pumped into LED lighting, there's sure to be some spillover into related markets like this one.
You can buy 100 watt LED emitters for less than $10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIBIqaeiE2M
That's for a white-light flashlight using a CoB (chip-on-board) emitter module.
OP's light emits (so say the specs
) a mixture of blue and red light. The idea behind growlights like this is energy savings: Only emit the colors colors that will be used for photosynthesis. White LEDs put out a narrow band of blue directly from the emitter die, along with a wideband emission of roughly yellowish light that comes from the yellow phosphor. Your eye interprets the mess as white light. The phosphor can be altered to change the
color temperature of the light emitted. Cheap white LEDs tend to be very cool in color. Walmart uses them in their frozen foods section, and unfortunately, this is what people think LED lighting "should" look like.
At work, I made a lightbox that approximated a halogen bulb as the light source, even though it was good quality LED emitters.
"Ew, that looks old. It's too yellow. LEDs are more blue than that."
-"But those
are LEDs in there."
"Doesn't matter, white LEDs should look blue. Build another one."
The first white LEDs were on the blue side, and the reason that cheap ones are often very blue is that the phosphor is cheaper and there's less of it needed. Since less is absorbed and lost in the thinner phosphor, you can put a higher lumen rating on the package, and bigger numbers sell more product.
So you can have white LEDs that emit 2700K or 3000K, just like an incandescent or halogen light bulb, but a lot of the public thinks that LEDs "shouldn't" look that way, or they don't want to bother with LEDs because most of what they see are the blue-tinted cool whites beyond 6000K.
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