I recently freed up some space indoors to form a seedling station that will allow me to transfer plants out on the balcony during the growing season in my country, and for indoor pots in the off-season. It is a two-story shelf on the top of a cabinet.
However, there’s no windows in this room, so I need some grow lights, and I require these lights to be controllable from Home Assistant. I had originally thought I could just use a microcontroller flashed with WLED and connect some LED-strips to this, but apparently it is only compatible with these ternary output LED-lights and not any full-spectrum LED strips.
Ideally I would be able to have control over sectors (at least two in each story) and be able to tune the red:blue ratio. However, I will be happy if I can land on a solution that allows me to control each story independently, which I guess I can achieve with a regular system connected to a Zigbee switch or something like this.
I found tons of these full-spectrum LEDs on Aliexpress for fairly cheap, but I am inherently skeptical about buying anything from here from a quality and safety perspective, and especially stuff connected to mains.
Anyone here have a sweet setup for this they’d like to share?
I have a set of “dumb” grow lights plugged into some smart plugs which connect to Home Assistant. It’s simple, it works, and I like getting the power consumption data as well. Having multiple “zones” would just require another smart plug.
Did you opt for branded, more expensive grow lights or buy from e.g. Aliexpress or similar?
These were relatively cheap, off of Amazon. Probably not spectrally perfect, but they’ve been good enough for my seed starting.