The LED grow lights I have seen for sale cost far too much for me to mess with and are also built for 120Vac use. There may be others I have not seen yet of course, but so far I have not found any that I want to buy.
I want DC lighting to run directly from batteries. Leds are great because they use such low power. The prebuilt Led lights use far too many Leds in my opion and they try to light up everything. The only place the light is really needed is on the plants, not all the dirt between plants etc..
Blue light is for plant growth, stonger bigger plants.
Red light is for growing the fruits and veggies themselfs, should make larger better food (or flowers for house plants)
How fancy do LED grow lights need to be? Not Very.
I found a clearance item for $4, a 3LED BLUE moodlight set for auto use. Being I have a car the dash lights don't work in and cannot see my speed odmeter at night I bought it to use for dashlights in the car. Plugs into cigerette lighter, switch to turn it on/off and powers 3 Leds from 12V.
Of coures we know the first thing I did with that, I still have no dash lights in the car LOL
If these post well here are a couple pictures of my little 72 starter tray. The plants are Beef Tomatoes, Grape Tomatoes, Carrots. All were started at same time, so you can see the random growth that has occured on just normal lighting so far.
Notice in the pictures how all the plants are bent over to the left. That is where I had the blue LEDs most recently for about 11 hours. Before that I had the Leds on the right side and all the plants were bent to the right!
Plants only seek light to grow, so if they are bent over seeking the light like that then the lights are working to help them grow.
Of course we don't want plants bent in half, and Leds should be spread around and adjusted to the plants. I only had the 3 blue leds in that one set, and the plants basically chase the leds as I move them around. When I get more Blue Leds I will have them shinning down from the top and in from sides onto each plant once out of the tray and re-potted. For now I'll mount this set of 3 above and shinning down into the tray so that plants will grow UP not Over
It's only been about 18hrs or so since I wired that set to the battery for this and I can tell it's working. There is no way to test anything like this really to see what works best. If you can see the plants in the trays well enough you will see that even though they were all planted at same time, same seeds from same pack, no plants are the same. I have Tomatoe plants not even starting yet, some just poped out last night, and some fairly large. All were done exactly the same, but no two are alike.
My other egg carton trays planted the same day with same seeds using potting soil were barely starting and just over night I have several fairly large ones today.
It was interesting in the dark to see that even though the Bluelight could not be seen on the far right side of the tray as I had them placed, the plants still saw the light and bent to seek it better. Of course I will also be using a white liner soon to reflect the blue light back to the plants instead of the black box absorbing it. I may use Mylar, I think I have some empty chip bags.
This set of 3 as built for car use uses 0.02amps at 12V according to my meter. I have not taken the plug apart to see what's in it and probably won't since I want it for the car dash lights. For now I just stuck wires on the plug with electrical tape and connected to a 17amphr SLA.
I don't have the bulk Blue Leds yet, looking for some now. I will make battery operated Led grow lights to sit around. As planned now, I'll probably split a PVC pipe into strips, drill a few holes to press Leds into at various angles, run the sets from Bruces Ni-cads.
Being battery operated with the Ni-cads the lights will be very easy to move around and change things, no permantant AC/DC wires needed running around the greenhouse area. Simply change the batteries once a week or month with fresh ones as needed and recharge the used.
Of course I am setting up a small batch of brew for alky feul again, will be venting the CO2 to the plants also till they are ready to bud.