LED lighting for seedlings do it yourself
BACKLIGHT FOR SEEDING FROM LEDS WITH OWN HANDS
For most gardeners, the main limiting factor when growing seedlings is the lack of sufficient space on the windowsills.
In my case, the situation was generally critical: an old tiny house, one room and a kitchen and 70 cm wide windows with extremely narrow window sills. Window sills didn’t change the situation much, not a lot of light fell into narrow embrasure windows ...
The use of artificial lighting on incandescent lamps, and fluorescent lamps, is very expensive, inefficient and also gives excessive heat in the area of the seedlings. The situation has changed radically in the last few years with the advent of relatively cheap led lights and (more attractively) cheap components for their manufacture. Fortunately, the people here are handy, and even the representatives of the weaker sex, with minimal hints, often cope with this task quite easily.
LED LAMPS FOR SEEDLING OWN HANDS
With the manufacture of the first LED lamps, I completely got rid of the windows with their curved sills. Now the seedlings could be placed in any, even the darkest, corner of the room. Experimentally I came to the conclusion that for growing seedlings of most crops, 100 W of LED illumination on 1 square is enough. m. Here I speak not about additional illumination of seedlings, but about growing plants completely in artificial light.
Later I purchased a device for measuring light (luxmeter). Not to say that the 800 rub spent on it is very small, but the device turned out to be very useful for an objective assessment of the illumination in different places.
So it was possible to determine that the illumination level of 3000 lux is the minimum value at which the seedlings feel relatively comfortable. I try to give my pets a higher illumination of about 5000 lux. LED lights installed at a rate of 100 watts per 1 square. m, they give just 3000-5000 lux - at a distance from the lamp to seedlings of 15-30 cm. Closer to install them is impractical. However, some save on lighting power, and the tops of seedlings are directly under the LEDs ... only under the lower leaves of light, under such conditions, they will not get it.
Another important note on lux meters: they are all calibrated to the natural spectrum of light, or at least close to it. That is, sunlight, incandescent light, cold or warm light from LEDs or fluorescent lamps, the device measures quite accurately. But when working with full-spectrum lamps, it is already noticeably lying, and measurement under red-blue light sources has nothing to do with reality at all. I am an adherent of the cold white spectrum, in the extreme case of the warm. And I consider all red-blue or full-spectrum lamps to be aggressive marketing chips for the gullible. Twice I made a comparison - white lamps are no less effective.
Where did the idea of relocating part of the seedlings underground come from? The house is private, with gas heating. It so happened that a comfortable temperature for us is 25-27 ° C, lower - it seems chilly. The house is comfortable, but the plants are not very, especially on shelves at a high height: there the temperature can sometimes reach 30 °. And this is not the worst thing, the very low humidity of the house (30-40%) is much worse, and in frosty weather it can sometimes drop even lower. In the whole house it is almost impossible to raise humidity, and closed boxes for seedlings (with an adjustable microclimate) are troublesome and completely unaesthetic.
See also: Smart lamp for seedlings on LEDs with your own hands
So I noticed the underground. In the winter-spring period there the temperature is 8-12 °, and the humidity is about 90-95%. It’s also not what the doctor prescribed, but after working, you can slightly change the future habitat of seedlings. By the way, the first year I tried to use the underground as is, I just installed LED lights over a 2 square meter area. m. Put there, it would seem, the most cold-resistant seedlings - pansies, asters, celery, etc. But after some time he noticed that the seedlings of the beginning became dead, painful. Low temperature and high humidity are typical for the street in spring, but there is no daily temperature fluctuation in the underground. Perhaps this is the reason for the discomfort of seedlings, or maybe the illumination level of 3000 lux in such conditions is insufficient for plants (after all, the general illumination of the room is added at home - 300-400 lux, and this is similar to the illumination on the street on a very gloomy winter day, when -that will start snowing).
Well, the first pancake has the right to be a lump. By next year, I purchased a 100-metroe bay infrared silicone carbon fiber thermal cable for 1500 rubles. Unlike tough, coarse self-regulating cables, this cable is very elastic, it can be laid into any shape without the slightest effort, like a regular rope.
Another feature of it is the possibility of using only segments of a strictly defined length. For the cable I chose, the linear resistance 33 Ohm / m cable length should be 10-15 m long when connected to the 220 B network. Calculations showed that the 10-meter piece consumes 150 W from the network and heats up to a maximum of 65 °, and the 15-meter segment It has a power of 100 W and its heating does not exceed 45 °.
IMPORTANT. In real conditions, the cable temperature is almost always much lower, since he gives the heat to the soil or to any other nearby bodies.
As a frame for laying the cable, I assembled shields from a 20 × 20 mm bar with a size of 600 × 750 mm (it is convenient to lower such underground). I installed metal sheets of the appropriate size on top of the shields. They will be a platform for seedlings and at the same time a source of evenly distributed heat. According to my estimates, 6 meters of cable had to be passed into each shield for optimal heating. Therefore, to obtain an acceptable working cable length of 12 m, I connected two shields with a thermal cable together in series (6 + 6 m), the total power consumption for each such coupler (0,9 sq. M) was 120 W. In total, I collected three such pairs with a total heating power of 360 watts. Initially, doubts plagued me - can I raise the temperature in the underground from such a low power from 8 ° to, say, 18 °? Although I was going to use incomplete 3 square meters for my seedlings. m, the total underground area of 20 square meters. m, and it seemed that it was impossible to warm a large area with such power ... but in practice everything worked out. Though slowly, almost in a month, but the temperature in the underground rose by 10 °.
Of course, not only these 360 W, but also a part of 300 W consumed by LED lighting, released as heat, went to heat the underground. Approximately the total heating was 500 W, but not around the clock (on a weekly programmable timer I set the light day 14 h).
See also: Self-illumination for seedlings (LED)
After the underground warms up, heating is tied to the daylight, there is an intuitive feeling that the temperature calm for plants is unfavorable, it is unnatural for them.
Practice has shown that the selected surface heating power 120 W per 0,9 square. m was a little too big. Measurement in the evening showed that the temperature outside the heating zone 17 °, the temperature on the metal sheet 25 °, but the thermometer placed in the center of the glass with seedlings, showed as much 29 °. Here is the last moment for me was unexpected, I did not expect that the temperature in the rasadnykh ploshka will be higher than on the metal sheet, and even so! Later it was necessary to connect the heating through the thermal controller, limiting the heating of the soil in the glasses at the level of 23-25 °.
Separately, I’ll focus on how the humidity in the underground has changed: from 95% it dropped to 85% in the non-heating zone, and 50% in general became a seating area.
The tests performed showed that the climate for the 8-hour night with the lights off and heating turned off changed as follows. The total temperature in the underground fell slightly (2,5 °) and amounted to 14,5 °. The temperature on the metal sheet and in glasses with seedlings is approximately the same - 17 °.
Humidity jumped to 89% indoors and to 73% above the seedling table. Well, apart from a small blunder with excessive heating of the nursery table, the experiment ended quite well. That seedling, which happened to get a residence in the underground, was very pleased with this apartment.
After some reduction in the heating of the seedling table, watering of the seedlings became quite rare and scarce, once in 2-3 days (the seedlings in the room sometimes had to be watered with 2 once a day).
Reference by topic: Lighting of seedlings with LED diode tapes
And another important question: how much do you have to pay for electricity? In my case, this is 360 + 300 W x 14 hours per day - about 9 kW, or 270 kW per month, comes out. Yes, it’s very expensive, but in reality the amount comes out a little less - not always all the seedlings are fully involved. And this pleasure is in demand only about two months a year.
© Author: P. KOKURIN, Ivanovo
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