Starting seeds indoors requires some form of artificial light. The easiest and cheapest way to accomplish this is through the use of 40 watt flourescent 'worklight' style lamps. These can be found quite cheaply ($10-15 for a 2 tube light) at your local big box home improvement stores. In my case, while renovating our condo's bathrooms, I salvaged the old worklight style lighting fixtures and rewired them to have normal wall plugs.
It is difficult to see in the pictures, but I have two light fixtures connected with pieces of scrap wood. The wood pieces have one eye bolt each with an 'S' shaped piece of coat hanger wire to allow easy adjustment on the chain.
For chain, I am using a purpose bought dog chain. For $4 for a 15 or 20' length, it was far cheaper than any hardware store chain would have been. The chain makes it easy to change the height of the lights as the plants grow.
The picture looks clutter because I have added reflection panels to maximize the amount of light available to the seedlings. The panels are nothing more than cardboard cut to size and wrapped in aluminum foil. The aluminum foil bounces the light around the enclosed area increasing the light density. Without the reflective panels the light would spill out into the room and not be available to the plants.
An additional benefit of the panels is they help keep the plants warmer than the surrounding basement. Although flourescent lights are fairly efficient, they do produce some heat, in my case the ballast that drives the flourescent tubes also produces a good amount of heat. Although I haven't measured it, this heat definitely keeps the plants warmer than without. In fact, after the 14 hour on-time, you can feel that the basement is warmer than it started.
Some people use heating pads to warm their seedlings. I am counting on the lights to provide enough heat. I found out the hard way that this is not good enough for germinating peppers. It seems to be enough for everything else, however.
It is difficult to see in the pictures, but I have two light fixtures connected with pieces of scrap wood. The wood pieces have one eye bolt each with an 'S' shaped piece of coat hanger wire to allow easy adjustment on the chain.
For chain, I am using a purpose bought dog chain. For $4 for a 15 or 20' length, it was far cheaper than any hardware store chain would have been. The chain makes it easy to change the height of the lights as the plants grow.
The picture looks clutter because I have added reflection panels to maximize the amount of light available to the seedlings. The panels are nothing more than cardboard cut to size and wrapped in aluminum foil. The aluminum foil bounces the light around the enclosed area increasing the light density. Without the reflective panels the light would spill out into the room and not be available to the plants.
An additional benefit of the panels is they help keep the plants warmer than the surrounding basement. Although flourescent lights are fairly efficient, they do produce some heat, in my case the ballast that drives the flourescent tubes also produces a good amount of heat. Although I haven't measured it, this heat definitely keeps the plants warmer than without. In fact, after the 14 hour on-time, you can feel that the basement is warmer than it started.
Some people use heating pads to warm their seedlings. I am counting on the lights to provide enough heat. I found out the hard way that this is not good enough for germinating peppers. It seems to be enough for everything else, however.
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