Indoor plant lights

 I was looking round for plant lamps. Ended up buying a Phillips plant
and aquarium T8 tube.
Been reading, but no really good info. I'm not growing a big crop,
just seeds. I'm
just trying to keep them warm right now. Got heat and halogen lamps.
There are various CFL's and
I have a few dozen myself, of different colors. I know you need UV of
some sort.
In the past I have used black lights, not for plants. there are at
least two types of Black Lights or BL.
One type is filtered, blue tube. The other looks like a regular
florescent and when its on looks dim unless
it fluoresces something. I know these have a good UV output since when
I used them, would bleach out colors
pretty good on objects close by, but is not the hazardous germicidal
types. The only thing I know will work is
metal halide arc. Maybe some automobile arc lamps ??

Anybody know more ??

 
In years past, growing pepper seeds and stuff, just put them in
upstairs windows. Basement
is rather cool right now, and the seeds are not really working well.
Is there any problem
of seed being frozen through the mail ???

greg

 There are low energy LED lamps now available for indoor cultivation...
They give out the right spectrum of light and generate no heat, which
cuts the electricity right down.

Worth looking into as an alternative...

 
I look around, most of the commercial stuff is for pot. Grass.

I am growing the other kind of grass, catnip, and peppers.

I will just look up plants spectrum for growing..

greg

 In article


The same mechanism that allows cannabis to grow (Chlorophyl + sunlight,
carbon dioxide & water ---> glucose
glucose --> cellulose
glucose + ATP ---> growth)
allows all green plants to grow.

Cannabis grows in dirt or with hydroponics. Is that any reason not to
grow other plants that grow in dirt or with hydroponic?
-----

The Color of Plants on Other Worlds
Scientific American
April 2008
(Available at better libraries near you.)

pg. 48

The energy spectrum of sun light at Earth¹s surface peaks in the
blue-green, so scientists have long scratched their heads about why
plants reflect green, thereby wasting what appears to be the best
available light . The answer is that photosynthesis doesn¹t depend on
the total amount of light energy but on the energy per photon and the
number of photons that make up the light.


***Whereas blue photons carry more energy than red ones, the sun emits
more of the red kind. Plants use blue photons for their quality and red
photons for their quantity. The green photons that lie in between have
neither the energy nor the numbers, so plants have adapted to absorb
fewer of them. ***    


The basic photosynthetic process, which fixes one carbon atom (obtained
from carbon dioxide, CO2) into a simple sugar molecule, requires a
minimum of eight photons. It takes one photon to split an
oxygen-hydrogen bond in water H2O and thereby to obtain an electron for
biochemical reactions. A total of four such bonds must be broken to
create an oxygen molecule (O2). Each of those photons is matched by at
least one additional photon for a second type of reaction to form the
sugar. Each photon must have a minimum amount of energy to drive the
reactions.

The way plants harvest sunlight is a marvel of nature. Photosynthetic
pigments such as chlorophyll are not isolated molecules. They operate in
a network like an array of antennas, each tuned to pick out photons of
particular wavelengths. Chlorophyll preferentially absorbs red and blue
light, and carotenoid pigments (which produce the vibrant reds and
yellows of fall foliage) pick up a slightly different shade of blue. All
this energy gets funneled to a special chlorophyll molecule at a
chemical reaction center, which splits water and releases oxygen.
The funneling process is the key to which colors the pigments select.
The complex of molecules at the reaction center can perform chemical
reactions only if it receives a red photon or the equivalent amount of
energy in some other form. To take advantage of blue photons, the
antenna pigments work in concert to convert the high energy (from blue
photons) to a lower energy (redder), like a series of step-down
transformers that reduces the 100,000 volts of electric power lines to
the 120 or 240 volts of a wall outlet. The process begins when a blue
photon hits a blue-absorbing pigment and energizes one of the electrons
in the molecule. When that electron drops back down to its original
state, it releases this energy‹but because of energy losses to heat and
vibrations, it releases less energy than it absorbed.

The pigment molecule releases its energy not in the form of another
photon but in the form of an electrical interaction with another pigment
molecule that is able to absorb energy at that lower level. This
pigment, in turn, releases an even lower amount of energy, and so the
process continues until the original blue photon energy has been
downgraded to red. The array of pigments can also convert cyan, green or
yellow to red. The reaction center, as the receiving end of the cascade,
adapts to absorb the lowest-energy available photons. On our planet¹s
surface, red photons are both the most abundant and the lowest energy
within the visible spectrum.
--
- Billy
http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

http://peace.mennolink.org/articles/israelpeacegroups.html
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/01/20111812130964689.html