INFO on LEDs and plant growth

Any knowledge on LEDs and plant growth out there? Could LEDs be used in an aquarium hood? They would be nice because they don't throw as much heat which is a problem for aquariums in the summer.

Obviously a spaced out array of LEDs would be required with a plug into the wall set up.

There have been a lot of studies on the subject of using LEDs to grow plants, do some searching here on the internet

They don't throw as much heat as incandescents, but probably more than good quality fluorescents.

It's an interesting topic, but my preliminary search didn't bring back as many results as I had thought. LEDs ought to be perfect as plants do not use the entire spectrum of visible light, but rather the prefer the two (red/blue) ends. A cluster of red and blue LEDs ought to make a great plant light.

But oddly, no one has brought one to market yet.

You'd have to use a lot of LEDs to equal the intensity of sunlight.

Today one of my guppies got sick and so i decided to seperate him to keep the rest of the population healthy. So i went about setting up my large fish bowl and heater which i have laying around for such occassions. The only thing missing was a suitable light. I ussually would strap a small 5 watt nightlight to the bowl and keep it on the same timer as the tank. But this produced way to much heat for the fish bowl and would evaporate allot of water. So i decided that this time i would experiment with a 5 watt LED that i had just gotten from Wayne. I had already mounted the star on an aluminum rod that i had just for testing purposes. So i decided to make a reflector for it out of a large white clam shell i had. I mounted that on the rod and hooked it up to a variable DC wall adaptor. I fired it up and realized that this was absolutely perfect for my purposes, and looked quite attractive with the shell too. I had the adaptor set to 4.5 volts which seemed to produce more then enough lighting for the bowl. I started thinking about trying to grow plants in the bowl with my newly made LED setup. I'm going to be doing just that as soon the guppy get's better and i can change out the water. Right now the medication i have in the water will kill all plants and snails so i'll need to wait. But i'm wondering if anyone else has tried growing any kind of plants with luxeons. My search on the net seemed to find allot of canabis growers experimenting with it with mixed results. I'll keep you guy's posted when i start the experiment, if it works out i'm thinking of converting my existing tank canopy to use perhaps 3 or 4, 5 watt luxeon stars. If your interested i'll post a couple of pics later.