5/17/10

The Best LED for Plant Growth V -- POST#100

If you have read all the posts on this blog from day one then you have read 100 posts so far.  Thank you!  If you just found this blog, you have a lot of back material you can search for information.  I find that writing something about growing each week (or more often) makes me a better grower.  Also, I enjoy reading and answering the E-mail's you send, it makes me learn new things or think about things that I sometimes take for granted everyone knows.  Please feel free to search this blog for answers to your questions and if you don't find specific answers write any time and I 'll help as best I can. 

Five weeks after potting up and the basil plants have begun flowering under the LED and are in full bloom under the higher wattage and closer T-5.  I set out to test (and show with a few pics.) if the Tri-Band  from HTGSupply.com can grow plants.  I have continued to  use the grow tent  and Tri-Band  after eating the basil in these pictures.   I have grown a couple different flower species, lots more basil, and marjoram.   I can't say yet the LED is my primary light of choice, I am not getting rid of my 600 or 400 HPS.  However, for growing in small spaces  or indoors in general there are a lot of benefits to the LED.   First, the Tri-Band LED has low heat production, it uses only 120 watts, yet has very high light intensity (you can germinate many seedlings under the light because you can keep it much higher above the seedlings than a fluorescent).   Also, LED's do not loose light intensity like HID bulbs do (MH in 1 year and HPS in 2-3 years).  LED's should put out the same intensity as day one for many years (100,000 hours are suggested but obviously I have not had time to test this yet).   Moreover, the light wavelenghts of the Tri-Bband from HTGSupply.com can induce a good flowering response in basil and marjoram and I imagine all plants.  Other LED may not promote proper flowering and/or vegetative growth even if they look red and blue to your eyes.  All LED's are not the same.
 I want to finish this series of posts about my first grow with 100% LED light by saying that the results I got with the Tri-Band beat the growth of any LED light I researched in scientific papers a few years ago.  This technology is advancing all the time.  I think that HTGsuply.com has got the edge on LED.  However, I am open minded and I'd like to hear if other LED lights you have used have been duds or studs for your plant growth and if you have compared other LED's to the Tri-Band.
Again thanks for reading, I hope to help people grow for many more 100's of posts.

 Good Growing,
 Dr. E. R. Myers

If you are interested in growing herbs like me, I wrote about drying herbs  in a previous post





1 comment:

Daphne Weld Nichols said...

Wonderful to see such progress - that seems very fast to me - is it?
Thanks - Daphne