As I write this it is the last days of July. It’s the middle of the summer, but in the next month and a half we can expect our first frost here in Southern Ontario. It will be that time of year to think about moving summer inside.
I have a friend who started a landscape and pond business last year. This business is seasonal from May to the end of September. It’s at this time he needs to add some sun to his shop. In the retail part of his store the water plants he will sell and keep for next year could not survive with the existing light so we put two eight bank 6,500k T5 fixtures over this plants and it worked beyond our expectations. The plants grew very well under these lights, in fact they thrived. When September rolls along and the landscaping stops he plans to put all the water plants under one T5 and hang the other over the koi tanks in the fish room to give them some good “summer sun”.
It occurred to me that three or four years ago I would have suggested that he hang two 400 metal halide systems without thinking about it. It’s a subtle change in horticultural lighting hardware that I did not realize fully until a short time ago.
The first T5’s I sold were to a customer who had salt water reef tanks. He wanted two, six bank fixtures with four 6.500k bulbs and two actinic bulbs in each. The bulbs that came with the fixtures happened to be 5,000k but these would not be powerful enough to grow his corals, so I ordered 6.500k bulbs and 6.500 bulbs only, from then on.
I put a light meter on a four bank fixture which read from 24,000 to 27,000 lumens, a foot or so from the bulbs. This is comparable to a 250 metal halide bulb and covers a larger area (4’ x 22”). The T5’s run on less power and much less heat than an HID lamp. The T5 bulbs are relatively inexpensive and will last 18 months or so before they need to be replaced. The bulbs can also be replaced two at a time over a couple of months.
Another feature that adds versatility to the T5 fixtures is that they can be placed at any level where the light will be easier on the eyes than HID lights.
After saying all this about T5 fluorescents, HID lights still have their place in all kinds of situations. You can’t beat the area covered or lumen output of an HID light. You would be hard pressed to get better light spectrum or power on a 125 gallon reel tank efficiently without a 10,000k HID bulb or two.
A good friend of mine wants to build an orchid room. She wants to build a lath house inside a spare 12’ x 12’ room in her basement. Popular in Victorian times, lath houses were built outside with spaced laths in a sunny part of the yard. The laths would not let the sun shine for long on any part of the leaves. In a room in a basement, the laths will be more esthetic, but having the laths built out from the wall on 2’ x 4” studs, there will be good air flow all around the plants and they can be hung or placed on any part of the structure itself including the ceiling. The plants will be placed in a tiered arrangement from high light to low light as needed. The main light source will be a 1,000 watt metal halide that will burn in the horizontal position. She has decided to use magnetic coil ballast in this situation because the humidity will be held at such a high percentage at all times (50 to 80%). The floor will be tiled and thankfully it will have a drain. Against the back wall will be a workbench two feet wide with storage space underneath. Over this, she is going to hang a 4 bank T5 for propagating and separating different orchids. There will be a dimly lit area under the stairs between the basement and middle floor where she can put a bench and a four bank T5 fixture with two 6,500k bulbs and two 2,800k bulbs in the middle position in the fixture. In this way, she’ll be able to display flowering orchids with plenty of red in the spectrum. Putting the 2,800k bulbs in with the 6.500k bulbs was her brilliant suggestion. Orchids are costly with the initial outlay for plants totaling in the hundreds of dollars. The passion of keeping and showing orchids can be made less expensive and take up less room by simply using T5 fixtures in the proper setting.
In 3 weeks at the end of August I’m meeting with a teacher I work with at a technical high school in Stratford, Ontario. In the school itself there is a large room that has been set aside for hydroponics. There is 135 running feet of NFT trough with two 50 gallon reservoirs and six 1,000 watt MH bulbs over the area. A two part A&B nutrient solution flows through the troughs. At one end of the room is an area with four 6’ fluorescent fixtures over a propagation table. All this area can be cut in half with one 8 bank T5 fixture at less cost overall than a 400 watt metal halide, while freeing up some valuable space.
At the other end of the school there is a green house that is approximately 100’ long and 40’ wide. It is heated with natural gas in the winter and has two 1,200 CFM fans for cooling in the warmer months. The greenhouse runs from September to May. This means that three full crops can be harvested in this time. The greenhouse and the hydroponics room are part of a horticultural and landscape program. Around April the students start to grow annuals for potted plants and hanging baskets which are sold at a weekend sale in late spring. The money is used for funding the running of the greenhouse and hydroponic area. We are now going to discuss putting a couple of T5 fluorescents at one end of the greenhouse to start propagating and breeding orchids to sell at the yearly spring sale.
School is going to start soon and cold weather is coming shortly thereafter. All indoor growers will be thinking of bringing the summer inside. With fairly new hardware like T5 fluorescents, electronic ballasts and innovations in horticultural bulbs it’s simply a matter of choosing the right hardware for the job. It is actually easier now to sort out and build an indoor garden than it was say five or six years ago because of information, changing technologies and quantity and quality of products available.
For me (an older fellow now) the realization of the benefits and proper placement of the T5 fluorescents was sort of convoluted. When you are so focused on the past ways of doing things the changes are subtle….. As subtle as summer turning into fall.
