How to Improve the Efficiency of Your Grow Light

While this article focuses on our seedlings grow light, it is also functional for any standard fluorescent fixture with the reflective shade.

If you have looked into indoor grow lighting for your herbs and vegetables, you know you can spend anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to nearly a thousand dollars, just depending on how serious you take your gardening. We live in the Rocky Mountains and our growing season is short, so to get an early start and even for many of our plants, we grow year round. Rather than invest a thousand dollars on a light that will cost a hundred dollars a month to operate, for our little indoor closet garden we purchased a rather inexpensive 2200 lumen grow light. This light is not sufficient enough for full sized garden plants, but if your getting and early start on Spring, this light is great for your seedlings and cuttings.

As our seedlings and cuttings began to grow, the light was quickly outgrown also. You can tell when the light is not strong enough because your seedlings will shoot up real tall and skinny until they fall over and die. The plants were really too small for the bigger lighting, but too large for the little 2200 lumen fluorescent light, so we adapted the light for a little more efficiency. You are probably familiar with the white painted fluorescent fixtures, this is what came with our grow light. White while being reflective still absorbs and disperses light in too many directions, so we solved this problem with some aluminum foil and a glue stick.

We started off by removing the bulbs from the fixture and cleaning the inside of the fixture real well. Next we dried it thoroughly and made sure it was clean. (Be sure to unplug the fixture first). Next, we took a roll of aluminum foil and tore off a piece about the same length as the inside of the fixture.

Next I put glue stick to cover at least 50% of the surface and 100% around all the edges and in the crevices and valleys where you want the aluminum foil to stick securely.

Now place the aluminum foil, centered over the light fixture and begin applying it by pressing into the center of the fixture first and smoothing it out toward the ends.

Once the foil is securely in place in the center, then start forming it over the contour of the fixture, into the valleys first, and working that toward the ends and keep working toward the edges until you have the edge reflective area smoothed out.

You might need to pull the foil back a little on the edges and add more glue stick until you have a solid stick along the entire surface of the edge.

Once the foil is completely in place, hold the foil so it does not tear into your work, and with a small sharp knife, trim along the very edge so nothing sticks out to get torn or look ugly.

Once this was completed, we inserted the grow lights and turned it on. This method will improve the efficiency of your grow light so much, it is blinding, I quickly turned mine over. Now we have our light hovering about 6 inches above our seedlings and can probably use this light for up to 8-10 inches of growth, (estimated). I would say the actual light our seedlings are under is probably at least a 50% improvement, however I do not have a light meter to give an accurate measurement with.