i want to upgrade my indoor lighting. right now i have a 4' shop light fixture with walmart aquarium and plant bulbs. the table i am lighting is about 4 foot. what do you guys and gals recomend. i mostly have paphs and some oncidiums and other random stuff any info would help.

I grow all my slippers and a few other genera indoors during winter with no natural light, under very bright HPS with SonAgro bulb light system. With my HPS, I ca just about grow and bloom anything. The light is on a light mover and placed about 3 ft above the plants which gives me ample space to water and tend to my plants. Hope this helps!

do you have a pic paphraguy? where did you get it? how much$

i want to upgrade my indoor lighting. right now i have a 4' shop light fixture with walmart aquarium and plant bulbs. the table i am lighting is about 4 foot. what do you guys and gals recomend. i mostly have paphs and some oncidiums and other random stuff any info would help.

I think if you are limited to a 4' table, you are probably best off with the shop lights. You can buy small HID lights, but they are kind of expensive and I'm not sure they are worth it. I actually have a 100W HID in a box, un-opened... So I know they make them. But it probably cost $150 or so, I suspect.

I like 400W Metal Halide lights. I think that is a good size for many applications. But I think the best way to approach the problem is to decide how much space you want to illuminate (well... maybe how much space you _should_ illuminate). That is determined by the size of your room and various other factors, including how skinny you are to squeeze between benches, and SAF (spousal approval factor). Once you know how much space you can steal... err... 'use', then you are in a better position to decide what size lights you need.

thanks littlefrog i actually have a 15' x 15' room thats all mine orchids and frogs... i was looking at the 400w for like 200$ wich is fine. i am getting another 4' table to go next to the other one lang ways as for the squeezing factor i am 6'3 310 pounds there is no squeezing in my case. could i angle the two shelfs in a 90 degree and hang the 400w in the corner would that be enough lighthere is a pic of the one table
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y154/nikkiandstan/Picture212.jpg

Well, here is my light room. It is 8 x 11 or so...

http://www.msu.edu/~halgren/Pictures/Plant_room_right.jpg

The full tour (with narrative) is here
http://www.msu.edu/~halgren/orchids/Growing_room.htm

Actually the only thing in there right now is several mortgage payments worth of phrag flasks... The rest of the plants are in the greenhouse.

For perfect use of space, I'd probably build benches that were 5 feet (maybe 6 feet since you are tall) square. Actually round would be perfect use of space, but that would be a royal pain to build... At that size, you can easily reach any point on the table from the appropriate edge. Obviously you would need to put this where you could get at all the sides.

I'd probably make the bench 3.5 feet tall. Then a 400W MH light hung from the ceiling would do a pretty good job of illuminating the whole bench. Put the brighter light things in the middle right under the light. When you have filled up that space, remember you have space underneath. See my plant room...

Since your floors are carpeted, you will need to make sure your benches don't drip on the floor. That isn't really a problem, I can give you some tips if you need them.

I sometimes get paid to design plant rooms and benches... But usually I end up doing it for free. *grin*

I don't remember how much I paid for my 430W HPS w SonAgro bulb, it was a long time ago, so I think it was around $300 shipping and reflector and glass cover included. I posted a pic of my grow area in the Orchid Gallery. Here is the link: Members' Grow Area Photos (http://www.rainbowcomputers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=45)

What is the difference between metal halide and high pressure sodium lighting? I've been looking at both and am thinking that the MH is used while plants are growing and the HPS is used when they are blooming?

Also would each type of light need a different reflector & ballast? Or could a lighting fixture/system accommodate both types of bulbs?

Thanks!

What is the difference between metal halide and high pressure sodium lighting? I've been looking at both and am thinking that the MH is used while plants are growing and the HPS is used when they are blooming?

Also would each type of light need a different reflector & ballast? Or could a lighting fixture/system accommodate both types of bulbs?

Thanks!

To my eye, MH is more blue, and HPS more yellow. You can find the spectra on the internet somewhere. The differences aren't as great as they used to be. The main difference is in the light output spectrum of the bulbs. In the last few years, HPS bulbs are mainly being sold in an 'extended spectrum' version.

I personally prefer MH lights. I like the color better (a friend's kid called the HPS lights 'devil-lights'). The MH look more like natural light to me. And the plants do fine.

You cannot mix and match ballasts. You can use the same reflectors (the lamp sockets are different, but the reflectors don't have to change). You can purchase 'dual' fixtures, which run a MH and HPS bulb off of different ballasts in the same fixture (and usually the ballasts are in the same box, as well). I have one sitting unused in my garage...

Susan, MH emits blue light important for plant growth and HPS emits red light for flowering. There are systems that come with both lights in one and then there are switchable ones. Mine is HPS with SonAgro bulb which also emits blue light and it is perfect for growing all kinds of orchids indoors without any natural light. Mine is on a light track mover and covers an area of about 8' x 6' of my grow area. Hope this helps!

I have a 1000w HPS and a 1000w MH on timers in my basement greenhouse/fishroom. Everything, even the fish, seems to like the lights. I got my lights at an online auction site for less than $100 ea about 2 years ago

www.stealitback.com

Thank you everyone for your answers!:-dance:

Another concern I have is that I have a very large picture window facing South on the second floor bedroom. It gets alot of light, even in the Winter. I wonder whether I even need a light system? Would it be too much? I was thinking 400 watts on a track that moves, but maybe I don't need that much? I wonder whether 100 or 250 watts would do the trick??

I'll try to post a photo of the growing area. Before I moved the orchids out, I put up some gauzey curtains to filter the sunlight, as it can get very intense in the Summer. In fact, that is one of the reasons that I moved the Paph family outside into a screenhouse in the back yard. I didn't want to burn them!!

Thanks for all your answers!

Susan, you still need lighting for your plants indoors by that south facing window because our Maine winter days are so much shorter, the sun is not as intense and we have many dark cold and wintery snowy days.

How do orchids do with the low wattage fluorescent bulbs. I am referring to the ones that use a few watts, but produce a lot of lumens. I guess it's to save electricity, but do orchids like them?

How do orchids do with the low wattage fluorescent bulbs. I am referring to the ones that use a few watts, but produce a lot of lumens. I guess it's to save electricity, but do orchids like them?

The general consensus of what I've read says they do like them but with increased exposure and set really close to the source. The hours of exposure seem to make up for the lack of LUX. I find it to be a balancing act with a 4-bulb, 4' gro-light set-up but it's the best I can do for wintering all my plants. You get them too close and either the heat can damage the foliage or the light can be too intense.

For anyone interested, there are combo MH and HPS combination lamps out there and I would recommend checking out
http://www.northernlightsgrowroom.com/8%highpressuresodium.htm for them. It can be a bit pricy but these things are my goal when I win the lottery.

As to light quality, again, everything I've read says that veggies as well as orchids need a full spectrum of light to process both vegetative growth and reproductive growth which I why I mentioned light quality in a response to Milda earlier. I, and I expect most of us, augment blue spectrum fluorescents with either incandescent or natural sunlight and not even realize we're meeting the full spectrum need.

My two cents...

Yes, I would like to know.

Before I put evrything out into the screenhouse, I had a plastic storage tub full of seedlings and compots in an unlighted room. All I had was a grow light. During the cold months I put a heating pad below them. The seedlings and compots seemed to do very well with the grow light and heat pad...

But what do I know?? I think the seedlngs requirements are different from the mature plants. When I bring them in again, I will have that separate place for the compots and seedlings, as I think that their lighting requirements are different.

I currently am using 2 48" 40 watt fixtures Total of 4 bulbs per shelf. I use warm and cool bulbs from the local box store. I did not notice any change when I used plant bulbs. I am able to bloom and grow all of my paphs so far. Good Luck!

susan wrote: Another concern I have is that I have a very large picture window facing South on the second floor bedroom. It gets alot of light, even in the Winter. I wonder whether I even need a light system?

i grow all my orchids in front of a big southern window with no additional artifitial light. although i live in israel winter days here are very short too, and it's not always sunny. nevertheless the plants grow and bloom fine. i belive they get more light in the winter because the sun is low in the sky.
here is some of my growing space in the living roon (taken on january):

http://lrg.zorpia.com/0/649/4156552.6b6535.jpg

amber that is very beautiful! very nice presentation! :clap:

Looks very nice! Thanks for sharing!

looks nice Amber......your place doesn't any different from here in the States....I always like to see how others live in different countries...thanks for the photo

Amber you might want to supplement that light with a few light fixtures just to help your plants get all of their light needs. I am sure you can grow them fine without it, but they will grow a little faster and bloom a little sooner with more light.

I suggest if you want to keep fluorescents that you use:
50% Plant Light (red, for flowering)
50% Daylight Bulbs (blue, for growth)

If you want to upgrade to HID, You should use:
50%+ Metal Halide (blue, for growth)
50%- HPS or Sunlight (red, for flowering)

Never EVER use halogens. Bad spectrum and only 20% efficiency.

Steve - what about those LED one's you're testing out - any thoughts yet? I saw them advertised in Orchids magazine and it reminded me that you mentioned you were testing them.

I haven't gotten them yet to start testing them. He also needs to send me the spectral information. But those lights would probably be perfect, except for their relatively high initial cost. My concern is the total light output. For example, a 400 watt metal halide might put out 30k lumens, of which maybe 50% are blue. So we have 15k lumens of blue per 400 watts. That would be roughly 35 blue lumens per watt. Okay, and some LED output say 75 lumens per watt. Fine, but then how many total watts of production do you get from an array of blue LEDs? 25 watts?

So then it might be that you need 8 panels of LEDs (at $90+ per panel) which would be $720 to match the output of a $100 Metal Halide. Granted, the LEDs will last 10x the life of the metal halide, but even 10 bulbs at a $20 each still makes the Metal Halide attractive.

I really won't know until i see the real specifications and test them. It could be a better product, but at a exponentially increasing cost of efficiency.