LED Grow Light Experiments and Review

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Several months ago, I did a few experiments with a LED grow light that I bought off of EBay. I decided to put up some pictures that I took of the plants as they were growing to give people an idea as to how well they work.

Lettuce Plant

The first type of plant I tried was lettuce. Since I already had the nutrients and everything, I decided to grow it hydroponically. The plant below started out as a seedling. (Sorry about the blurry pictures. My camera had a hard time focusing with all of the reflective foil in the shot.)

Here is the same plant 13 days later. You can see that it has grown a fair bit over that time. This is about where the plant stopped though. The stems continued to grow some, but the leaves did not, which resulted in a rather sad looking plant.

Tomato Plant #1

Here is a tomato plant that I also tried growing. I didn’t have especially high hopes for it, but tomato plants are pretty versatile, so I figured why not give it a shot.

Here is the same plant 13 days later. Like the lettuce plant, it grew for awhile, but eventually seemed to just give up.

Tomato Plant #2

I decided to give up on the hydroponic system, and next tried a tomato plant in regular potting soil. This plant wasn’t enclosed in reflective foil like the other ones were. It also had some access to the light from the outside, but not much. This is about as much as the plant managed to grow. In fact, the leaves eventually started to fall off of it! It’s at this point that I just said the heck with it, and took it down.

Conclusion

The LED grow lights that I used obviously weren’t good enough to get the job done. I had my apprehensions about them from the start, and, if it wasn’t for the fact that I had an idea for another use for them besides just growing plants (more on that later , I wouldn’t have bought them.

They don’t seem to be good enough for food production. You might be able to keep a decorative plant alive with them if you wanted to; however, plants tend to look rather ugly under LED light which kind of defeats the purpose. Here’s another picture of the lettuce plant with the LED lights shining on it as an example.

Like I said, these lights are just the cheap ones. I have seen people who have had good luck with the more expensive LED grow lights, but those cost waay too much for me. You figure that you would have to drop around a grand to get something worthwhile.

There seems to be a lot of scams floating around when it comes to LED grow lights. Do your research when picking them out to avoid getting burned.

I will offer one final warning before finishing. The warning is that this page (written at the very end of 2009) likely has an expiration date on in. LED lights have a law called Haitz’ Law, similar to Moore’s law, which says that LED light output doubles roughly every 18 months. What this hopefully means is that sometime in the future you really will be able to buy cheap LED lights that actually do what they say they are supposed to do.

My very unprofessional and mostly uneducated guess says that these things will really start taking off in 2016. We’ll see if I’m right. :^) Until then though, we wait…