Growing veg with red LEDs

[KevinL]

Apparently veg does well with the AlInGaP chemistry...

In what is considered a world-first technology, beds of leaf lettuce are ripening safely indoors at a factory in Hikari, 50km east of Tokyo, under red light-emitting diodes (LEDs) which illuminate mobile phones.

The process, developed and licensed by Cosmo Plant Co, which set up its first factory in 1999, expands on indoor farming methods that use fluorescent lights.

Red LEDs require less power, cutting by 60 per cent the electricity bill from fluorescent lights, said Cosmo Plant president Hisakazu Uchiyama.

"The annual electricity bill fell by about ¥60 million ($A754,700)," Uchiyama said

Full article


I'll believe it, R/O Luxeons have awesome efficiencies (55lm/W!)

 

[nekomane]

Kinda scary.
photo

 

[PocketBeam]

Hm, interesting. I can't see the article, but I don't see a mention of how well the lettuce did. In a side by side test did they both show the same growth.

Also, keep in mind that different plants need different types of light. So I wonder how well this works with other plants.

Still I find this a little surprising. I would have thought that they needed more UV. This is neat research and I wonder if they will try different colors.

 

[idleprocess]

I imagine it takes a heck of a lot of LEDs to grow heads of lettuce... It would be interesting to know how many watt-hours it takes, on average.

 

[greenlight]

Cool idea. Maybe an individual led growing pod will be next.
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Free E.T.!

 

[James S]

As long as it's less power than HID lamps to grow them then it's a good thing.

What's the point of lettuce though? Has no nutritional value at all /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif Gotta grow something I can eat on long space flights, then I'll be excited about it.

Seems there is some DIY potential here too, not all that hard to setup some arrays and red led's and red's are also the cheapest to play with!