New Project: Red/Blue LED Grow-down

It's a week late but as promised, I have restarted the red/blue LED side-by-side comparison. In this new setup all plants will be grown in the same deep water culture unit, with one half of the plants receiving light from a blue LED panel and the other half receiving light from a panel with both red and blue LEDS:

Pictured here is a hasty shot of the system that I set up, shot from a mobile phone. There are a couple of small problems that need to be straightened out before the plants can go in- the floor isn't quite level under the system so the nutrient level would be slightly deeper at one side than the other. Also you can see that the red/blue panel is sagging just a bit and needs its outer edge lifted.

The crop will be Bullet Romaine lettuce (seeds from Territorial Seed Company). Having all plants grown in the same system will eliminate any errors due to discrepancies in nutrient mixing.

Where are the plants? They're all off together in a starter system until they germinate and develop roots, at which point they'll be moved into the deep water system.

One control that is missing from this experiment is a set of plants grown under conventional lighting. After the results of the LED experiment are in, I'll do another experiment using the winning LEDs side-by-side with a more conventional compact fluorescent grow light.

As a special treat, I'll be tracking this experiment via time-lapse camera, so there should an interesting video to watch at the end of things!