Indoor LED growing

[nerobot]

Hi All,

While I wait to see if I can get an allotment (5+ years waiting list, yippie...) I've built myself a small indoor LED "grow box".

It's been running for a week now and have been growing mixed lettuce. The system has 8 blue 3W LEDs and 4 red 3W LEDs (cheap no name ones from China). So far my seedlings seem pretty happy, but I'm wondering if temps of about 25C are too high to growing healthy lettuce.

Photo below shows their current progress and they don't seem too leggy so far.

Bit more info on my blog here if anyone's interested.

So, anyone else growing indoors using LEDs?

Steven

[Kristen]

I'm wondering if temps of about 25C are too high to growing healthy lettuce.

Yes, probably.

However, I'm doubting that you have enough "lumens" to grow Lettuce (as distinct from just keeping them on tick-over)

[nerobot]

I'm now trying a few methods to get the temperature down, which should hopefully help.

It's hard to say if there's enough lumens to grow the lettuce well. A quick test on my phone shows the lumen level to be similar to what I get on a west facing windowsill when the sun comes in. However, The sensor is so sensitive to the light direction, I'm not sure how much I can really conclude from that.

The seedlings are coming along well now and many have now started growing their 2nd true leaves. Getting a bit leggy, but I think that's due to the extra heat.

[Kristen]

It's hard to say if there's enough lumens to grow the lettuce well. A quick test on my phone shows the lumen level to be similar to what I get on a west facing windowsill when the sun comes in.

I've seriously doubting that "8 blue 3W LEDs and 4 red 3W LEDs" is enough lumens for a whole box of lettuce plants ... but time will tell, eh? Ideally it needs a side-by-side test with something else to compare it against and to see which performs better in identical temperature etc. conditions.

[nerobot]

Yeah I'd like to do a side-by-side test sometime soon and see how the LEDs compare to lets say the windowsill.

For now, here's a quite update on progress. On Friday I took the following photo, which is 7 days after the last photo.



As you can see, they are coming along nicely. In fact, last night I had to thin them out and added the thinings to a nice little salad. Very nice.

Will keep updating for anyone interested.

Steven

[nerobot]

Hi All,

Just a quick update for anyone who's interested. It's now the end of the third week in my experiment, and the photo below shows the lettuce 7 days after the previous photo was taken.



Can still see some good growth. I've thinned them out a few times now and they made nice additions to two salads.

Steven

[nessa76]

I'm not using LED lights but I have mine near a lamp, seems to be helping alot though