Hydroponic growing in the dead of winter! LED light strip saves the day.

My seedlings were not doing very well and I assumed it was due to the lack of a strong light source. (they were thin and leggy) I get good sun though my south facing window but its is the middle of winter (when the picture was taken) and the hours of sun where low. I decided to add in a LED light strip and have had a lot of success with that.

The LED light strip: http://www.adafruit.com/products/306

RGB 32 LED strip with programmable colors in any all the colors of the rainbow. From various sources it is known that red and blue light work the best. Simple science, plants are greenish yellow to our eye meaning they reflect those colors and absorb the other in the visible spectrum, namely blue and red.

I had to add a 5V additional power source to get the maximum light out of stripe since the pi does not supply enough power on its own.  There is plenty of documentation out there and tutorials with this strip if you decide to use it for your project. It comes with a demo program that seriously runs for nearly 10 minutes with all the flashing, waves, pulses, colors etc that it is capable of doing. Seems a little overkill now to just ask it to run on its blue and red LEDs.

As soon as I put the light in my plants responded very well, the lights are on for about 16 hours a day. This picture was taken on January 2nd in the middle of a Chicago winter and my plants are happily growing! I consider this a hydroponic success. This was exactly the point, to continue to grow plants in the dead of winter!

You can also see here that I zip tied a short piece of wood to the light strip so that it would lay flat. Can also see the purple hue of the red/blue LEDs.