I have quite a few plants I keep in my house, purely so I can enjoy some greenery in the colder months of the year. There is one thing that most plants miss if you want to do the same, and that's some sunlight. Luckily there is a way to solve this, at least partially - using LED lights.
Doing a little research, it appears that the plants find the blue and red LED lights the most useful, while the green and white light is the least useful for growth.
For this project I gathered what I needed - some wiring, a LED light strip, a 12 V power supply and some casing to put the lights in.
The casing is just a plastic container in which some of the stuff from Temu comes in. The LED strip came from a broken wall mounted light strip, but it is quite cheap to buy too. And also this was a RGB light strip and I needed the red and blue colour. The wiring came from an old Wifi cable, and also those old Scart tv cables have the same wiring. I used the same 12V power supply which the LED strip used, but almost any 12V power supply will do.
Because I thought that separate light sources would be better for my plants than a single source, I cut the light strip into six separate pieces (along the marked lines). I could have also used a single unbroken light strip and wrapped it around all the plants, but the strip that I had was way too damaged.
The casings only needed a hole for the wires to go through.
Wiring and soldering is rather straight forward - negative to negative and positive to positive. At first I soldered the wires to the led strips remembering with is positive and which is negative. It helps a lot when the wires in ethernet cables and scart cables are colour coded. Led strips I positioned in the case and secured with hot glue gun.
Power supply I already had, but I also wanted a connection. I used a female plug which fitted the power supply and soldered the wires from led strips accordingly. I could solder the lights directly to the power supply, but maybe this would come in handy in some later projects.
Here is the end result. Few weeks later it seems to be working quite well. Some of the plants have access to more light than others, but those that do seem to have a positive reaction in growth.
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