I had an interesting idea on my walk home for lunch.
So, I popped some Hot Pockets into the oven, and put it together while they where baking.
I made the box of LED christmas lights I got from Walmart into a grow light. I have been reading about LED growlights for a while now, and I want to give them a try. This is a cheap DIY way of trying it out. No soldering required.
Here I marked off the box. 60 lights. That gives me 5/8ths of an inch squares centered on the box.
I punched the holes with a ball point pen.
Here I stuck all the lights through the holes. I started in the middle, and just worked back and forth across the box and towards each end.
It puts out a decent amount of light. You can see where it is blown out the CCD on the camera on the floor. The LEDs are fairly directional, so there isn’t much light lost to the sides of the ‘fixture’.
I doubt it’s enough for serious growing, but I can give the concept a try. I can daisy chain units together if I wanted to. Each one of these boxes would cost me about 3 cents a year to run year round. One light per plant. That’s pretty cheap for artificial light I think.
