Indoor Orchidarium Build

[sesh]

Hi everyone!

Sharing my Journey building my indoor Orchidarium here.
At this stage I would not call myself a beginner, nor an expert.

I began this in 2018, soon after I realized that my Windowsill Orchidarium was not going to materialize. A lot of learning was carried over, though.

My aims were simple :
To grow AND FLOWER orchids under completely artificial lighting.
I did not want to grow them in shelves, nor did I want to enclose them completely in an aquarium type of enclosure.

So I began the build by building the framework.



After the framework was done, I started on the lights.

At this point, I wasn’t sure it was going to work, so decided to go with Chinese stuff as they are cheap.

Here the aim was to achieve the Required intensity at the plant while the light remains at the top.
The solution was, of course, Lenses. Bought some stuff from Aliexpress.



Then tested the lights.


Then, to hold everything together, I machined a couple of MDF profiles.



And then put 16 of them up and the plants underneath, and crossed my fingers! They've been there for 10 months now, not doing so badly.


Troubleshooting:
My electronics took some time to stabilize, with a single bead of one light blowing every other day. I literally tore my hair out, trying to figure out where the problem was. Turned out there were multiple factors.

Drivers: A series of nine of the beads I had chosen needed 54-63V to run. I found the voltage the drivers were giving out would randomly go up even to 75v. So I junked the Chinese drivers, and bought some Indian ones where the voltage was ‘capped’ at 70v. That reduced the frequency of lights blowing, but it was still happening.
The heatsinks: I had cobbled together a bunch of heatsinks, from various sources. For me, this video was a life saver: