Hello! I just ordered grow lights for the first time. I ordered a light bulb and some that clip on to something. How exactly do these work? How long should they be on? Most of my plants are part sun/part shade but I have a few that are full sun. What is best to make this work? They will all be in one room most likely.
Not sure what kind of clip lights you got, but here's an old picture of my setup with clip on lights; they were clipped to the stand and they had holes in the clip part that I used to hang them from command hooks. I leave mine on for 12 hours from spring equinox to fall equinox and from fall to spring, they're on for 8 -10 hours, depending on what the timer settings are (to simulate a dormant period). Plant lights work a little different from actual sunlight, so I normally start all plants about a foot from the light. Depending on how they react, some get moved a little farther away. Usually the full sun plants are fine with it and depending on the shade/sun plant, some are fine, some need backed up to about 2 feet from the light.
I recommend getting a light meter
I second that recommendation. I realized some of my lights had little effective unless they were 1 foot or closer to my plants. My plants flourished once I got them closer to the lights.
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I buy BN-LINK digital outlet timers to automatically turn on/off my lights. A 2-pack was $18 on Amazon. My guess is if you've ordered grow lights once you'll be tempted to buy more! Definitely easier to let the timers do the work for you than to manually turn the lights on and off. Especially useful when you're on vacation and you're not home to use the switches! Oh, and I leave it on from 8:00am to 8:00pm, so 12 hours.
0 likes I'd avoid the wifi/bluetooth smart plugs, though. Bought one and it stopped working because we had wifi issues in the house. Defeated the whole purpose of the plug, and tbh I never manually turned it on/off via my phone anyway. Sometimes simpler is better!
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