FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Today, I started to dabble in the idea of my very first indoor grow area with an artificial lighting setup. The one thing that is confusing the life out of me is the number of lumens.
The bulbs I can easily get my hands on are 3ft 30w T8 fluorescent tubes with an output of 2400 lumens each.
My possibly very stupid question is: do the lumens increase with each tube you add, as in 2 tubes will give me 4800 lumens?
Are lumen levels more important than watts or vice versa, or are they equal?
To start I will only have one shelf for my D. Aliciae, D. Binata and D. Capensis.
What would be the recommended lumens for them?

I'm interested in knowing the answer too, I would also like to know if 1 floresrnt tube per self is enough, or should I have more like 2 or 3 ?

I can't answer how much lumens for those plants but I can answer some of the other questions.

Lumens is definitely more important than watts. Lumens is a measure of how much light is being output while the watts is how much energy is required to do so. More efficient bulbs will put out more lumens per watt. In order of increased efficiency is T12<T8<T5 with some sub categories like T5NO(normal output) and T5HO(high output).

The more efficient bulbs also tend to run hotter so there is a trade off. A T5HO may put out more light than a T8 but you can put your plants much closer to a T8 to compensate.

I would imagine for drosera a 3ft T8 set up in the 6000K range should be sufficient.

Also, lumens would increase as you said but only where the lights overlap. With bulbs close together the difference is negligible so you are effectively doubling/tripling the lumens.

Here's everything you could ever possibly need to know about artificial lighting for CP's...!

http://www.flytrapcare.com/phpBB3/lumen ... um#p144568

http://www.flytrapcare.com/phpBB3/best- ... um#p153234

Perfect, that's exactly the type of information I needed. Have a much better understanding of all the numbers now.
Unfortunately, I don't think my bulbs will do because they are 4000k bulbs which, as one of the links states, is not a recommended plant light.
But hey-ho what harm I'll just keep looking.

Glad the links helped. I was in the same situation last year. I had always used regular household fluorescent tubes for starting my non-CP bedding plants each spring. They did okay, but some of them would tend to stretch and get tall and flimsy like they weren't getting enough light. Turns out, it just wasn't the right *kind* of light.

After collecting some CP's last summer, I wanted to be sure I had the right kind of lights for them over the fall and winter, so I did a lot of research here on the forum and eventually wound up buying a Quantum BadBoy like Veronis recommended with a mixture of 3000K and 6500K bulbs. My CP's did great over winter dormancy and this spring, the bedding plants I grew from seed did a thousand times better under that light too. It seems as though having the right frequency (color temp) is just as important as enough brightness (lumens).