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Comment by chris_engel

5 days ago

Hm, you cannot simulate sunlight at all with an RGB LED ring. You can create something that looks cool for our human eyes but the average plant wouldnt make it long beneath them because its basically always living in the dark; the important wavelengths are missing.

This is also a huge problem for people having a terrarium with geckos or saurians - they see and need much different wavelengths than we humans do.

I am no expert for carnivorous plants - maybe they are fine but seeing that there is no UV emitting part in the lighting setup, there may be an important part of the spectrum missing for the plants.

From skimming Wikipedia it seems like most absorption happens in the blue range and a bit less in red, almost nothing inbetween at green. Most LEDs are blue with a phosphor, so you usually get more blue light than the rest already.

But surely there are LEDs optimised for that task (Cannabis grow lights)

  • There are LEDs optimised for that purpose. Not strictly necessary though.

    Someone I know had a very successful indoor cannabis grow using nothing but a cool white outdoor LED panel light from the local hardware store.