A grow light is any light :)

The more light, the better, for plants. It is quite hard to have too much artificial light, especially on a budget. You can grow under regular fluorescent tubes and you can grow stuff like lettuce (part of your plan?) under a set of say four tubes. Tall plants like tomatoes are trickier because the light gets dimmer further from the tube, and the bottom of a tall plant is going to be a ways from the tube. You can get around the problem by using a lot more tubes (or a different type of bulb giving a lot more light), or by surrounding a small number of plants with vertical tubes.

You can't grow well with incandescent (regular) light bulbs or with halogen lights. Neither produce enough light and they produce too much heat. You can grow with HID (metal halide or HPS) bulbs but they are quite expensive and best saved for larger installations. Small (So, on the cheap, get thee some fluorescents. Look for 40W tubes producing more than 3000 lumens. You'll need several, plan on a minimum of 20W per square foot of plants you want to light. You'll get better results with more than that. Get cool whites or daylights, not warm whites or soft whites. You can mix and match warm whites with the others if you want, but not the warm whites on their own.

Full spectrum fluorescents are expensive, they don't produce any more light (usually less!) but they may produce light that is a little more effective for the plants. Another type of tube is the GroLux or Plant&Aquarium lamp, also expensive but specifically designed to prodice the light that plants like best. If you want an expensive tube, this would be the kind to go for. Results seem to vary, some people say their plants do a lot better with them, others see little or no difference.

P.S. Your cats may prefer the lights to the windows, they'll be warm :)

The prices on LED plant grow lights have come down recently. I use an LED grow bar for my office cube set-up that gets very little light.

I have not had a chance to go out and buy anything yet but I did take a desk lamp with a purple tinted bulb and a fan over some baby tomato's and they are GROWING TWARDS THE LIGHT! WOOT!

I have a window in my living room that gets SOME morning sun so I have them in front of that for now and so it is: Window, Plants, Postionable Desk Lamp, Fan.

So they get the natural early morning sun then I turn on the lamp after I get up so they get some light on one side and intense, lamp light, on the other.

The little fan makes the leaves go back and forth gently and I heard somewhere that the movement helps make their stems strong. Is that true?

I feel kinda' mad at the Hyrdo Places and pet stores I looked at because they always made it sound like you need some kind of Super Special lights that emit Super Special types of light that normal bulbs can't do...

Oh, and I LOVE the idea of LED's! That would save a TON of space! I still have to be able to use my home office for WORK as well as the plants!

I have not gone out and gotten any type of frame yet so I am just using a folding tray table since my lamp is a clip on.

I am almost twitching at the ideas that I have for the simple set up in the office!

I want to keep as many plants as possible out on my patio for the spring/summer but I do want to grow some cat plants for my two and experiment with some fragile flowers!

THANK YOU for all the advice!

If you use a timer, you don't have to worry about turning the lights on and off manually. The fan is generally a good idea to keep mold/fungus at bay. I suppose that wind does make stems stronger, but I don't think it applies in this case. Strong light will help encourage better stem growth. The fan may also provide enough air movement to help discourage some insects pests.

Growlight LEDs appear relatively dim to the human eye and may be a good choice for the office. However, the recommended setup (if you dig through all the hype) is 2 "LED bars" per square foot of growing area. You may be able to use less if you are just supplementing natural light or bright artificial lighting or for growing low-light plants. For comparison, I use one ten dollar compact fluorescent light bulb to light a square foot vs $150 for an LED bar. Initial setup costs still seem to be high for LED systems :)

You really need to look into the LED systems carefully if that's the way you want to go. The information available from the web-based vendors is extremely deceptive and in some cases is simply lies. If you thought the aquarium stores were trying to part you from a large amount of money, the LED sellers will shock you ;)

BTW, the purple-tinted bulb is useless, possibly worse than useless, for growing plants.

Since this thread is not really about LED light, I will just respectfully disagree. I use LED grow lights because it makes sense for my grow area. I think others will benefit by using LED, but it will be their choice to make based on the information available to them.

Right now I am mainly concerned about Price more then Space.
If I can keep everything small and relatively cool then great but if I need to give up some extra room to lower costs then I will just have to suffer.
And what is to stop you from talking about LED growing?
Light is Light is Light... just because florescent is the way most people go doesn't mean that you can't talk about your experiences!
I am interested! PLEASE talk about LED's!!
With the Tech improving every day we may phase out Florescent in the next few years so let the discussions begin!
Thanks!

Dave needs to be careful what he says about LEDs because he sells them on his website, and it would contravene Gardenweb policies to promote them too explicity ;)

Light is Light is Light

If this was true then LEDs would be useless. They produce less light per watt of electricity than fluorescents or HID lights. In the future, they show the promise of being more efficient than the fluorescents, and this has been demonstrated in labs, but they aren't available to you and me yet. Remember this when you see claims about low energy use and low heat output, LED lamps use somewhat more energy and produce somewhat more heat than a fluorescent producing the same amount of light. The reason that the units seen for sale use so little energy, typically 2W-6W per lamp, is because they produce very little light ;)

LEDs have several useful properties. They are light (don't weigh much!), almost unbreakable, last a long time, produce a very directional light output, and produce an almost monochromatic light.

The long life may be useful in a plant light, but this is where you have to start being careful about claims from people selling LEDs. The typical number you will see quoted is 100,000 hours. In practice this is meaningless. LEDs do not fail, they just get dimmer over time while continuing to draw power. The 100,000 hours is some time that someone in a lab found they were still getting light out of their LED. In practice LEDs become too dim to be useful as a plant light after as little as 5,000 hours. Other LEDs can still be producing good light output for as much as 50,000 hours. Until the sellers show you lumen maintenance curves for their lamps, you should be cautious.

The directional light output is quite useful in a compact plant light, one intended to light a limited number of plants, but you can get the same result with a reflector and a conventional light source. Again the LED unit can be very compact because it doesn't need an extra reflector.

The main thing that makes LEDs viable as plant lights at this point is the monochromatic light output. Plants use light at some wavelengths, red and blue, between 2 and 5 times more efficiently as green light. An LED system can be designed to produce only those wavelengths and so maximise the effectiveness of the light on the plants. In fact they produce mostly the red light because it takes less energy to produce one red photon than it does to produce one blue photon, and then they add in a little blue light which is required to make the plants grow healthily. It isn't clear exactly how much more power-efficient this can make an LED lamp compared to a fuorescent and it seems to vary depending on the plant, but claims of 33 times better which you will see are bogus. That number may come from comparing an LED system to an incandescent bulb with a bunch of best-case assumptions, I really don't know. I think you will find that you can get equivalent growth with an LED lamp for about half the power of a fluorescent, possibly as little as a fifth the power in some cases.

The takeup of LED lighting by commercial growers can tell you a lot about when these are the preferred lighting system. Takeup is essentially zero because they are not cost-effective. A very few systems are in place in Japan, and are claimed to be cost-effective over other lighting systems, where both space and electricity are very expensice and the setup cost probably a lot lower than most other countries.

So, use LEDs if space, weightm or robustness are issues, they were used for space shuttle experiments for those reasons. You may also choose them if the lowest possible electricity use is vital. Perhaps the design or appearance may be preferred, my own home-built light setup is hardly attractive! Set those factors against the very high initial cost, several hundred dollars for even the most basic system.