FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

I'm no expert, but I'll throw my thoughts out anyhow.

My thinking is that neps do not need crazy bright lighting. It seems that diffused window light works well for them and overly bright light can hurt them...? Do you have a window situated that you could use for the nepenthes? On the other hand, the drosera will do well beneath bright light. The light strength will be stronger in the center and will fall off toward the edges...I would put the drosera in the center and the neps around the perimeter.

Determining light requirements from specs seem to be problematic for me in that there's lots of info out there on plant needs and on how to calculate the light. I use this website a bit for figuring my lighting. I *think* it's a fairly accurate website in regards to the lighting articles. This is the page I use the most, "Part 2", but the previous part, "Part-1" preps you a bit for it.
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I had a bunch more written but while I stepped away from the computer my beautiful bride slipped into the chair and surfed elsewhere. Of course her priorities were much higher than mine...she was searching for Christmas songs to carry to the women's jail ministry that she heads up at our county jail so I'll let her slide. Anyhow, the above is all that was in the cache when I got back.

I'll add here that halving the distance to the plants from the light will/should/might(?) quadruple your DLI but reduce the coverage area significantly. Doubling the distance will reduce the DLI to a fourth of what it was while increasing the coverage area. The 15w bulb will have a low DLI, I would say go on up to the 24w or even the 32w bulb if you can swing it...future-proof for other projects...you can raise or lower the higher wattage/DLI bulbs to fit your needs. The 15 watt bulb will be the most restrictive in adjustments.

Anyhow, I'm no expert...that's worth repeating!
Best wishes and Merry Christmas!!!

Also, I'm not sure about the humidifier affecting the bulb. The specs say it is corrosion resistant, or coated or something. Seems that it might have a bit of built-in protection against humidity (which would make sense). But, I would think it will depend on how high the humidity really is.

Also, the descriptions on Amazon of the Sansi bulbs includes each bulb's PPFD which can be used in the calculators on the part 2 page linked to above.

I understand 100%...we gotta live within our means! Lots of people on this side of the water don't understand that concept, though. I mentioned that it was confusing to try to figure lighting out due to the data you can find. Unless you've got your own high-dollar equipment it's difficult to measure it yourself...but you can get "close". Here is another link to a list of PPFD recommendations: Carnivero: Genera Specific PPFD Recommendations. It seems on this list the 15w light is more than sufficient for the neps and does pretty good for the drosera, too! We do the best we can do. Watch your plants and see how they respond. A 100-120 watt flood light with daylight temperatures works pretty good, too. Like I mentioned...moving the light closer to the plants ups its intensity greatly. Just be sure it doesn't get too hot on the plants...most LEDs will do pretty good with that...I've got some 1-inch tall drosera filiformis growing *maybe* 2 inches (probably less) from a Yescom 225 white panel and they're doing great.

As for the humidity, you might try just having a bowl or two of water sitting beside the neps. If you use the tray method to water the drosera then that will help raise the humidity a bit. A plastic spray bottle set on a fine spray works pretty good to mist the plants with to raise the humidity...neps will like it, the droseras not so much. Yeah, when you start seeing mold growing you might want to back off a bit with the humidity.

I agree, these ladies of ours beat out most anything else on the priority list!

Another thing you could do is to add some back/side reflectors...mylar, aluminum foil, even a white piece of cardboard...anything to reflect "lost" light back to the plants.

You got me going down rabbit trails on plant DLI/PPFD needs so I was looking through the forum and stumbled upon this post/short-thread regarding lighting. Pretty in depth. I figured you might want to browse through it: post356199.html#p356199