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Grow light or Fake Views?

Here in Tasmania (43°S) we can have awfully short growing days in winter. If you have a penchant for salad all year round, and you don't like paying stupidmarket prices, then you may wish to employ an artificial source of light in a growing medium and boost the watery sunlight by an hour or so. Even better if solar powered?!

One possible problem is the use of a narrow frequency light source - if you miss the spectrum that chlorophyll is expecting to do it's photosynthetic magic then no amount of shiny goodness is going to help!

Our own sun (Mr Sol) is pumping out the good ergs across the required visible spectrum as follows.

So clearly if we can match the "natural light" spectrum, or indeed just provide that which is needed by chlorophyll, then the power will not be wasted (e.g. in lost frequencies). There are many expensive commercial options for this type of project, with impressive published spectral analyses to match the price.

There are also international standards (of course) for regulated markets, but I'm not looking run a commercial hothouse, I just want to see if these type of LEDs are effective. 

So with coins in hand I pushed the button on 50 3W "Natural Spectrum" LEDs via my favourite supplier. After calculating an appropriate resistor for the circuit I flicked the switch - they're purple?

So have I just been sent single frequency (or narrow range) lights? The only way to tell is to fire up the spectrometer (yep, I have access to one of those babies) and to run some tests. The result? You be the judge: