Artificial Lighting for Orchids

[moniluhum]

Wondering if buying a 300 watt 6500K lighting system. Good idea or are there better alternatives?

[raybark]

That depends:

1. What type ofg lighting? 300W of HPS and 300W of T5 fluorescent are vastly different.
2. What are you wanting to grow under the lights?
3. How much area do you need to illuminate?
4. Is the appearance of the plants and light in the growing area a concern? Consider a basement growing area and a living room shelf, for example.

[moniluhum]

Its a CFL bulb yo grow catts, onc, and dens. Would like appearance of plants to be natural as I am wanting to grow in living room setting. Guessing 300W may be too much. Ideas?

[raybark]

Yeah, I have a 250W CFL that I USED TO use on seedlings in my basement, but it was way too bright, so I use it merely for ilumination of my greenhousae so I can get around in it at night.

A couple of comments: CFL's are not my favorite light source for plants. Yeah, they're bright, and have pretty good spectral output, but even with an excellend reflector, you lose a lot of the output from the interior of the spiral - it just never "escapes" toward the plants. A good quality high-output T5 fixture is a lot more efficient in terms of output and what hits the plants.

LEDs are another option, but you'll want to stick to white ones, as opposed to the red and blue grow lights, as those make your plants look like space aliens.

With either T5 or LED fixtures, you have a great deal of flexibility in tems of distance from the fixture to the plant, size of the lamps, etc. Many of the plants you mentioned tend to handle heat pretty well, so the short-term savings of going with T5 over LEDs may be worth considering.