Cheap 80W LED vs. Natural sunlight

[MTechOver9000]

Hello everyone,

As somebody who would like to take on the fascinating world of Terraria for keeping carnivorous plants, I lurked the forums for a while to absorb as much as I could from such a great knowledge base.

In terms of lighting, while there are definitely great products out there which deliver impressive PPFD numbers, for me, it is important to keep my hobby sustainable and as cheap as I can.

I had so many questions about cheap lighting for my plants: are they garbage, could I actually grow with them...? 

Being a scientist by profession, I thought I would like to try and perform some experiments to answer some of these questions. In the video I compare the results of growing lentils in a sunny window vs. under 80W of artificial light to see how they stack up. I used a photoperiod of 12hrs. 80W will cost you about a fiver per month to run in the UK (national average).

The lights were:

100W Citizen CLU048 3500K (£13.24 on eBay) driven at 50W using 1500mah driver (£5.24 AliExpress) and

30W YXO Yuxinou driverless Blurple COB running BridgeLux chips (£1.66 on AliExpress, lol)

They were cobbled together using some thermal paste (£0.64 AliExpress) and scrap CPU heatsinks. 

So all in, around £20.

Interesting results indeed. I'm also currently performing comparisons between the Citizen and an equally powered AliExpress blurple and some "300W" led light panel that a company has sent me as a tester. Will report those results too if anyone finds them of interest.

 

Cheers,

MTech