Please help me with lighting suggestions: Bookshelf grow concept

Looking for suggestions for lighting a 33 x 15 inch bookshelf? That's 3.5 square feet, but its a long shape. Basically something like this, only 33 inches wide and with 5 1-foot high shelves.




The idea is to take out the bottom three shelves and grow two or maybe three plants side by side. One shelf over the grow area will be retained for clones/seedlings. For purposes of this discussion, lets say that I'm open to any type of lighting.

I'd like to go with a 3 foot 4-tube T5, but unfortunately the fixtures all appear to be exactly 36" long and won't fit. The 2 foot T5s are only 24W/bulb, and I just don't think one will have enough power here for flowering.

Obviously, CFLs "could" work, but I kind of want to get away from those.

Would a 250W HPS work? I'm worried that the center will get tons of light, but the sides will be "shortchanged" and not do as well. Can anyone suggest a particular brand of light and/or reflector that would work well for this space?

Two 150W HPS lamps could work, but I think that's a bit of overkill both in terms of cost and light output.

Should I go with (gasp!) an LED panel? Which one(s)?

Any other thoughts or ideas?

Bump. . .

Nobody has any suggestions for lighting a 33x15" space?

If i was in the same situation i would go with a 400 watt and vent it good. generally you want to have atleast 150 watts per plant minimum. t5's are nice because you dont have to vent the piss outta the room but you are skimpin on flowering light. Really the only type of lights i've flowered under are and were HID lamps so i have no first hand knowledge of flowering with t5's or led's but have had good results with HID lamps. Good luck

victimfactory said:

If i was in the same situation i would go with a 400 watt and vent it good. generally you want to have atleast 150 watts per plant minimum. t5's are nice because you dont have to vent the piss outta the room but you are skimpin on flowering light. Really the only type of lights i've flowered under are and were HID lamps so i have no first hand knowledge of flowering with t5's or led's but have had good results with HID lamps. Good luck

Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice.

Anyone else have anything to add?

4bulb 2 ft t5 has a foot print of about 2x2. thats 8000 lumens and if you do par lighting it will work out good. LED is expensive but you could get away with 2 90w UFO LED (around 200$ ea.)


the dimmable lumatek would let you dim from 400-250 that could be a good choice with a cool tube.

i dont know i would pick something bigger than a book shelf personally but i know how hard i can be to find something the right size.

shoot all in all CFL works and looks nice if you put some good DIY behind it. so dont just forget about it yet

build your own thing out of plywood and 2x4's or 2x2's easy simple and its the right size. i built mine, got a 400w cooltube in there. its a little small with the reducers attached because i got a 4 inch fan and the cooltube is 6 inch, but it still works.

me too fir3. i got a 2x4x4 made myself 2 400w in cooltubes in there

yup me too i built first my veg box it is 27 in wide 3ft long and 65 in high i was flowering and everything in it at first with a 250w hps but now i use it for veg and i built another one 4ft by 4ft by 68in high and i put a 400w hps in it and a 2ft 4 bulb t5 in the other box and they work out perfect....and i painted the inside of both flat white for reflection.........i think building your own is the way to go i built both of mine for 100 bucks

polyarcturus said:

4bulb 2 ft t5 has a foot print of about 2x2. thats 8000 lumens and if you do par lighting it will work out good. LED is expensive but you could get away with 2 90w UFO LED (around 200$ ea.)

the dimmable lumatek would let you dim from 400-250 that could be a good choice with a cool tube.

i dont know i would pick something bigger than a book shelf personally but i know how hard i can be to find something the right size.

shoot all in all CFL works and looks nice if you put some good DIY behind it. so dont just forget about it yet

Click to expand...

Thanks for the response.

I wish it would, but unfortunately, a 24 x 24 inch T5 lamp won't fit in my 15" wide space.

Yes, there is no doubt I could easily knock together something bigger and better than this bookshelf, but that's off the table for me. This is what I need to work with.

Do you have any experience with UFO type lights that you could recommend? My understanding is that most of them simply aren't very good. Decent 150W HPS setups are available for only about $75 each, for what that's worth.

hmmm..... 150w? no not for me id rather cram 300-500w of cfl in there, i can probably but all the parts i need for around 75$-120$

you could do x3 2ft 2 bulb t5 setup with the t5 one on top 2 on the side. split the book shelf in 2, and fit six 2ft t5 fixtures.

Jogro said:

Thanks for the response.

I wish it would, but unfortunately, a 24 x 24 inch T5 lamp won't fit in my 15" wide space.

Yes, there is no doubt I could easily knock together something bigger and better than this bookshelf, but that's off the table for me. This is what I need to work with.

Do you have any experience with UFO type lights that you could recommend? My understanding is that most of them simply aren't very good. Decent 150W HPS setups are available for only about $75 each, for what that's worth.

Click to expand...

what do you mean by off the table? a person with back problems can do it i think anyone can. its fairly easy, you will know the dimensions and know exactly how sturdy it is. a cheap bookshelf is made of cork board which is real cheap wood and breaks easily i think.

fir3dragon said:

what do you mean by off the table? a person with back problems can do it i think anyone can. its fairly easy, you will know the dimensions and know exactly how sturdy it is. a cheap bookshelf is made of cork board which is real cheap wood and breaks easily i think.

Click to expand...

I mean that the space is fixed, and I cannot go bigger.

Again, its not a question of me not being physically able to build a bigger box; doing that would be trivial. Its a question of having a particular physical space to work in and a need to use a particular piece to blend in.

Incidentally, the bookshelf in question most definitely is not made of cork board, balsa wood, or even laminate, but that's besides the point (see above).

what kind of answer ar you looking for if you want LEDs go to that section most of us dont fuck with thats expensive stuff. if it was me 400w cool tube keep it simple and a 250 mh down below

polyarcturus said:

hmmm..... 150w? no not for me id rather cram 300-500w of cfl in there, i can probably but all the parts i need for around 75$-120$

Click to expand...

Pure cost isn't my main concern here (though obviously its "a" concern).

In my opinion, 500W (or even 400W) is overkill for what amounts to only 3.5 square feet of growing area. Again, I'm not trying to light up a whole closet here, just a literally bookshelf sized space. I don't think I ought to need half a kilowatt to light it, and cooling that much heat output poses its own set of issues that I don't want to deal with.

Yes, I know I could just run a 400W cooltube HPS system in there, but then I'd need to pack ducting and an inline fans into my grow space, and the cost/complexity go way up. I'm simply trying to do something on a smaller scale. Again, with only 3.5 sqft, even a 250W still equates to a generous 70W/square foot, and I don't think I ought to need to go bigger (let alone much bigger) than that.

My issue with CFLs is that these are designed to throw light in a 360 degree sphere shape, not in a nice flat 2D plane for lighting a canopy. Yes, the lamps themselves are inexpensive, but contrary to what some seem to believe, under simple use, much of the light they throw out is wasted, because it gets sent away from the plants or trapped inside the bulb spiral. The spectrum is also not quite as good as HPS either.

So even though on paper CFL bulbs appear to be 75% as efficient as HPS, in reality they're a good bit less. You can significantly improve their performance with good reflectors, but if you can find them at all, high quality CFL reflectors aren't cheap (eroding most of the cost advantage of using CFLs). Could I hand-fashion the equivalent of 15 high quality CFL lamps with nice polished dimpled batwing aluminum reflectors? Probably. Do I want to? No, not really. T5s are really a better way of getting the most "juice" out of fluorescents, since the straight tubes really lend themselves to efficient reflectors.

I'm trying to maximize efficiency and simplicity here, and to the extent possible, I'd like to go with off the shelf components.

polyarcturus said:

what kind of answer ar you looking for if you want LEDs go to that section most of us dont fuck with thats expensive stuff. if it was me 400w cool tube keep it simple and a 250 mh down below

Click to expand...

See above. I'm all for simple.

Yes, it probably was a mistake to put this question in the "grow room" section, where people are thinking about. . .well, building whole rooms!

That's why when I ask about lighting a small bookshelf, I'm getting responses like "build a closet" and "use 500 watts". I'll take this over to the microgrow and LED forums and see what kind of responses I can draw there as well.

Thanks.