LED Grow Light for Indoor Plants for $30! Easy!
by frolen13 in Living > Gardening
6179 Views, 37 Favorites, 0 Comments
LED Grow Light for Indoor Plants for $30! Easy!
Hello! And welcome to my instructable!
If you are like me and don't have the most windows and want to grow some plants inside., here is how you could do it!
Normal LED plant lights can go for $100+ I will show how to make them for much cheaper for around ~$30
I'll show you how to make one that will work very well for most plants. I use mine for house plants!
If you are like me and don't have the most windows and want to grow some plants inside., here is how you could do it!
Normal LED plant lights can go for $100+ I will show how to make them for much cheaper for around ~$30
I'll show you how to make one that will work very well for most plants. I use mine for house plants!
What You Need for This Project
You'll need a few tools and some soldering experience!
- Scissors
- Soldering Iron and Solder
- Solder Flux (Optional)
- LED RGB Lights (I got mine from amazon for about $20)
- Double side tape
- Hot Glue Gun and Glue
- Wire cutters
- Wire
- Large Aluminum Baking Pan (Around $5)
- LED Controller and Wires to connect to the controller
How to Wire Up the LEDs
For a more detailed guide on soldering to LED strips, visit here http://www.ecolocityled.com/category/led_tutorials...
You need to cut as many lengths of LED strips as you can fit that span the whole pan. This will you can get the most amount of light per inch!
The steps are as follow:
- Cut and peel back the protective coating on the strips
- Tin all the contacts on both sides
- Prepare several 1.5-2'' lengths of thin wire
- Solder the wires to the corresponding 12V, Red, Green, Blue contacts, wiring everything in series in a snaking pattern on the pan
- Use the double sided tape on the backs of the LED strips to secure it to the pan as you solder the wired on. Make sure your strips aren't shorted by contacts on the back from the aluminum pan. If this happens you can coat the back of the strips with tape.
- Make hole to feed the wires through so you can connect the LEDs to a controller!
- Wire up your led controller and turn it on!
A fantastic example of how to make this in more depth can be found on this video!
It may be a different project but the concept is much the same!
Setting the Color!
Now most plant's chlorophyll only absorbs Blue and Red spectrum of light so a nice color to set the LEDs too is a solid deep purple. A good way to set this up depending on your controller is to set the levels of blue and red to the highest they can go and lower the green all the way.
You may be tempted to just make the lights white but turning off the green will save a lot of energy! Plants don't generally use green all that much! They reflect almost all of it!
At night time you can set the color to just red since blue light makes it much harder to sleep!
You may be tempted to just make the lights white but turning off the green will save a lot of energy! Plants don't generally use green all that much! They reflect almost all of it!
At night time you can set the color to just red since blue light makes it much harder to sleep!
Thoughts and Conclusion!
I hope yall enjoyed my project as it was very fun and easy to make!
Since you can set the color you can use the light for all sorts of things, video lighting, a lamp or making cool lighting effects!
Since you can set the color you can use the light for all sorts of things, video lighting, a lamp or making cool lighting effects!