It is confusing. I posted on this asking about my plant and aquarium bulb for houseplants. You can find some kind of plant bulb for almost any fixture. A regular fluorescent bulb might help but if you find a bulb that's meant for plants at least you'd know.

Get 2 or 3 shop light fixtures, the 2 bulb kind that uses 32w t8 bulbs. Get the bulbs in cool white... It wont grow your plants like professional greenhouse lights but they'll stay alive and grow. Do no water as often as you would outside as these are far from matching the sun's power, thus your plant metabolisms will be much slower.

voila!

Khaled

I am also in this confusing situation.
If you can afford to buy arrangements, this place has a lot of ideas -
I"m thinking about the table top one in the link. At under $100.00 it is the most affordable.
I can't afford to spend $600.00!

Here is a link that might be useful: Plant lights

hey on the advice given to me today DONT make the mistake I made and waste money buying the warm white and cool white tubes. go to your local home depot, or any store that sells fluorescent tubes. buy only DAYLIGHT tubes (the ones rated 6500K) the ones at home depot are good. you can buy them in twin packs. brand phillips. they are called daylight deluxe 6500K. the deluxe means they have a small amount of RED light in them which helps promote healthy flowering as well as the added benefit of being 6500K for good growth, keep tubes 6-12 inches from plant tops and aim for 14-16 hrs to keep the lights on.

My plant and aquarium bulbs are ten bucks and then the fixtures are about 15. I haven't been very successful with them but someone on here said it is the right kind of bulb just not much artificial light. If you had a whole bunch they might work. The fixtures are meant to mount on the wall which is very inconvenient. Only 15 watts each!

Nonononon. Do NOT get cool white lights. Get daylight bulbs @ around 6500k.

Like these:

2-pack Daylight bulbs

10 pack Daylight bulbs

Cool whites are only around 4000k.

Put plants with the highest light requirements near the center of the bulbs and plants with lower light requirements near the edges. Lighting drops off at the ends and edges.

Try to keep plants of similar heights on the same shelf, as much as you can given light requirements for said plants. If you have to mix heights, adjust the lights for the tallest plant and put the shorter plants on top of something to bring them closer to the lights. Or you could hang one side of the fixtures higher than the other so it slants from tallest to shortest.

Hang as many fixtures as you can fit in the space you have. At least 2, one in front of the other, would be best. You should be able to find T8 fixtures that will take 2 32W T8 bulbs for under $15 at Home Despot or Menard's. Make sure they are T8 fixtures - a lot of the cheapest fixtures these days are T12.

You can buy 4' long wire shelves which will make hanging the fixtures easier. I have 18" deep shelves in my (otherwise empty) closet because that's all that would fit in there - its just like 1/2" too narrow for the 24" wide shelves.

If you're at all handy you can easily build shelving out of 2x4s. Do not use any composite or OSB for shelving as it is cheapjack stuff that will literally melt if it gets wet, and sags something awful even if it stays dry.

Put your heaviest and largest plants on a bottom shelf to stabilize the entire unit - not on the floor. Put an actual shelf on the bottom and load it up. If you leave the bottom shelf off and just set plants on the floor, you will most likely need to affix the unit to the wall or it may tip over. That's to the wall STUDS, not just to the wallboard.

With the wire shelf units you probably won't actually use all the shelves if you have taller plants.

Also if you are minorly handy you can get some very narrow fixtures from Lowe's = 2.75" wide - so that you can hang a LOT more lights over each shelf.

However these come without plugs or reflectors, so you must wire plugs in (you can use cheap computer plugs from a place like Monoprice.com, or use cheap power strips - just disassemble and you won't even have to strip wire.

If you buy enough to fill up the space over the plants you won't really need reflectors; otherwise check the marijuana growing forums for ideas about cheap effective guerrilla reflectors.

Also consider a pulley system to let you raise and lower your lights easily for fertilizing/watering or even putting taller plants at one end and shorter plants at the other.

You can make this as simple or complicated as you like or can afford. A couple of dual-T8 fluorescents per shelf with the above bulbs (or equivalent) will do, or you can really load up on narrow-profile lights for more light and better growth and flowering, if you can afford it.

You could also switch to the T5 fixtures - you can special order both bulbs and fixtures from Home Depot for $40 for the fixtures, bulbs around $6 each in packs of 10 or $11 each.

The fixture is narrow profile with no reflector and may require you to wire a plug in, but it is the cheapest T5 fixture I've seen to date.

GreenhouseMegastore.com carries a wide variety of sturdy plant trays to catch drips. I like the ones with the green labels - they're made in the UK where gardening is srs bzness. Very sturdy.

T5s run hotter than T8s. And 6 or 8 T8 bulbs on a single shelf will generate more heat than only 2 or 4. You may want to consider the need for fans when planning the depth of your planter shelves and how many bulbs you will have per shelf. You could place a fan at the end of the shelf so its out of the walkway instead of in front of the shelves.

Also I would keep the lights within a couple of inches of the plant tops. Fluorescent light drops off rapidly with distance.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pulley system to raise and lower fluorescent strip lights

This post was edited by zensojourner on Mon, Dec 1, 14 at 22:22