5mm LEDS don't work very well and thats mostly whats marked as "grow" lights.

There are some top notch companies offering arrays of CREE leds and they give off amazing results. Although at about $550-650 each. To put it in perspective the Lightblaze 400 uses 56 RED/BLUE CREE and about 100W goes towards light. The 16 CREE array I built uses between 40-50W and gives off about 50,000LUX at 6in without any kind of optics to direct light. Plus it only cost $50-$60 to build ;)

BTW lux isn't a good reading for RED/BLUE lights but it does give you an idea of just how intense it is. Remember a well lit room is at about 500 ;) I'd imagine for the plant its much more intense. 50,000 on a normal meter with red/blue is good enough to get at least some growth at least 3-4ft down from the light. You would get tons of growth at about 18" on top of the canopy. And you can blind yourself in like 5-10 seconds lol.

So ericjwi do you know of any plans, sites to read up on this stuff, and places to get needed parts? I think for $50-$60 I can afford to build it for some testing. I would be interested in seeing what kind of results I would get.

Thanks for the info.

Oddly my detailed response is gone. you can get instructions for the "Led driver" on instructables.com . I'm using one of the ones with only 0.5v drop on the mosfet not the one that uses LM317. Its more invovled but also more efficient. LEDs were older model CREE off the internet. Not as good as the new stuff but it was much cheaper and this is really only my test light.

For an LED grow light to be effective it needs to contain more red than blue lights, and multiple nanometers of red. Before I bought my grow light, I did a lot of looking up before deciding on the right grow light. Though the grow lights are a lot more energy efficient, you need at least 12w per sq/ft up to 24w. For good specs you can look at Go Green Grow Lights , thats where I got my light

Here is a link that might be useful: LED Grow Lights

I will tell you this. I'm looking at my old banana plant pictures from when I was using a purchased 11W PAR38 SMT grow light (not high power) and running off my beta2 home made high power LED the leaves are a MUCH deeper shade of green. Beta2 is only 4 RED 630nm and 1 BLUE but high power running at about 2W each. Don't have beta3 results yet as it was only on a short amount of time. I'm almost finished redoing it. Should have scraped off the non stick coating to begin with ;) I did get readings and was still over 1000LUX all the way down to the hydroton.

Both lights have grown the plant very very well although it is only about 8-10 inches and the hydroponics probably has something to do with that.