I was Dead wrong about those cheap knockoff LED grow lights from Amazon

Bought a $40 four-panel setup for my basement seedlings out east and after 6 weeks they were leggy and pale compared to the ones under my friend's $200 Barrina rig he brought back from Calgary, so now I'm out the money AND the growing season, anyone else had a cheap light fail on them?

3 comments

3 Comments

felix14720d ago

Did you have them close enough to the plants? I ran into the same problem with a cheap light my first year and it turns out the panels need to be like 6 inches away to do anything. Those low wattage lights lose their punch real fast once you pull them back at all. Also if you were running them on a 12 hour cycle that might not have been enough, I gotta push mine to 16 hours with the budget ones to stop the stretching. Not saying the expensive ones are a scam, but I bet you could have got some decent results if you tweaked the setup a bit.

grantschmidt20d ago

Hold on, I gotta push back on this a little. I've been using the cheap panels for three seasons now and I keep them way further than 6 inches, more like 18 to 24 inches away, and my peppers and tomatoes turn out fine. If you put a light that close you're just asking for heat stress or burning the leaves, at least with the models I've tried. And the 12 hour cycle thing, I actually had to dial mine back from 16 hours because I was getting weird light burn and the plants looked tired. I think a lot of the "you need to run them 16+ hours" advice is just people overcompensating for weak lights. Your mileage may vary but I get solid growth with cheap panels at a normal distance and a normal schedule, so I really don't see the point in spending three times as much on a name brand.

simonp4717d ago

Honestly Grant's got a point, people act like cheap lights need to be touching the plants to work.