Enough artificial lights for phals and oncidium?

[Mercurianmad]

Hi guys. I’m trying to get all of my plants off of the windowsills and onto one shelf.

Here is a picture of the shelf at the top are three small fig trees. They’re dormant obviously. And they need full sun. On the middle shelf are my high light orchids, cattalya, vandas and cymbidium. On the bottom shelf on my low light orchids, phals and oncidium. Is this artificial light producing enough light for my phals and oncidiums on the bottom shelf. I can’t dim it because my orchids on the middle shelf need the high light.

The last picture is natural light, without the artificial light

[Mercurianmad]

Here’s the finished set up. I don’t want to burn my orchids.

[Orchidtinkerer]

Hi, looks ok to me but you just have to keep an eye on them for the first week.
I recently set mine up and within 3 days one closest to the lamp went a bright purple.
I've had purple before but this loooked like the plant had been dipped in purple paint lol. Far too bright - but I was mnitoring it and luckily no damage done, if I had left it any longer I would have ended up with light damage.

To help judge, you need to tell us the wattage of your light fixture so we can work out how strong each of the 3 lamps is and at what distance they are from the plants. I think you should be good but you might have something a lot stronger than I am guessing.

[Ray]

I would not call oncidiums “low light” orchids. I’ve always growth them about halfway between phals and catts in light intensity.

[Mercurianmad]

Those 3 light combined are 150 w with 350 LED beads total. They produce 800nm of full spectrum light together. Right now the intensity is turned all the way up.

---------- Post added at 09:35 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:34 AM ----------

I can also angle it so it predominantly hits the oncidiums and not the phals. At the moment I can only spare one of the 3 light heads to illuminate the bottom shelf

---------- Post added at 09:40 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:35 AM ----------

The lights are 5.5 inches away from the vanda on the second shelf, 6” away from the cattalya, 6-8 inches away from the cymbidium, and on the lowest shelf 10” away from the longest oncidium leaf, 14” from the smallest oncidium, 18” away from the closest phal

[Ray]

Originally Posted by Mercurianmad

Those 3 light combined are 150 w with 350 LED beads total. They produce 800nm of full spectrum light together. Right now the intensity is turned all the way up.

I think you've got your units mixed up. 800 nm is a wavelength in the infrared range (heat)

[Mercurianmad]

Oh dear I’m sorry. To be honest I don’t understand any of these terms: watts and whatnot. I’m just copying them off the Amazon website where I got the light. But thank you so much for the correction: it helps me learn a little bit more about lighting them.

[Ray]

Originally Posted by Mercurianmad

Oh dear I’m sorry. To be honest I don’t understand any of these terms: watts and whatnot. I’m just copying them off the Amazon website where I got the light. But thank you so much for the correction: it helps me learn a little bit more about lighting them.

Do you have a link to the lights? Maybe we can "shed a little light" on the specs.

[Ray]

The specs provided are quite lacking in detail. Is there a label on the unit that gives the amperage draw?

Orchidtinkerer’s assertion that the wattage in the US is 3x the actual wattage isn’t strictly true, but it might be close. Just as the “color temperature” of LEDs and fluorescent lamps are corrected color temperatures (i.e., corrected based upon how it looks to the human eye), the wattage of LEDs are often expressed as “equivalent” wattages - the wattage needed in an incandescent bulb to provide the same amount of light (in lumens) output.

Depending upon the LED chips used, I’ve seen the equivalent wattages anywhere from 4 to 10x the true wattage - which legally must also be shown on the device.

[Orchidtinkerer]

nothing to do with the US Ray, I blame chinese manufacturers for that one. The LED's sold on Amazon here are also labeled "wrong" in my opinion.

Like you I believe in comparing lights by the electricity they use. Otherwise we all know too well sellers will routinely claim their product is 10x better than their competitors identical product.

The specs like you say are very vague so if you go by the reviews you will see like I said one person measured it used 28 watts so roughly 10 watts per light. That is as good a point to compare as any in my books and absolutely fine to use. Unless you don't know how strong a 10w led is of course but it is what any standard Ikea grow light is rated at also for comparrison.

You could go into details about the CRI of different LEDs and that higher CRI Led's will produce more light per watt but at these low levels that difference can be achieved by adjusting the light a few cm's so really not worth going into complicated details imo.