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300w maxsisun LED sucking the life out of my sundews

  • Thread starter spookhouse
  • Start date
Has anyone had this issue with 300w LEDs. I'm growing a cape sundew, a binata, and an adelae under this light. The binata is spreading like wildfire but the cape sundew is wilting, new leaves are deforming, and the tentacles appear to be nonfunctional. The adelae is doing just fine except the tentacles on the new leaves become non-functional after a week.
 
Sounds like the light is too close for that plant?
 
Yeah, it sounds to me that the plants are not used to so much light. If you wait a few weeks their condition should improve as the plants have more time to adjust. Moving the plants an inch or two further away from the lights is also good.
 
I just moved the light up a few inches. This is my first time trying LEDs. From what I understand they're a different animal than fluorescents. The plants are fairly new to the collection too. The only thing I can really think is that the light is forcing the leaves to transpire faster than the root system can replace the water and it's causing damage to the more sensitive structures of the plant.
 
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I've understood that sometimes Red-Blue LEDs (which I understand your maxisuns to be) cause some plants that appreciate stronger light intensity to form unusual foliage. It doesn't surprise me that the binata is doing great, it's a sundew that can tolerate lower intensities of light, but the capes could be another story.

Jeff Dallas told me that his Drosophyllum and some Drosera under red-blue LEDs would produce bizarre foliage, twisted and irregular, and speculated that plants appreciating higher light intensity dislike red/blue-only spectra. Perhaps putting the cape sundews under white LEDs would help? Red/Blue lights work excellent for neps, possibly because many of them are partial-shade-growing lianas.

In my experience, Red-Blue LEDs for drosera tends to irregularly cause weird foliage. I have red capensis under such lights in my setup but they are only just sprouting from root cuttings. I'll see if they produce weird foliage in the future.
 
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I've understood that sometimes Red-Blue LEDs (which I understand your maxisuns to be) cause some plants that appreciate stronger light intensity to form unusual foliage. It doesn't surprise me that the binata is doing great, it's a sundew that can tolerate lower intensities of light, but the capes could be another story.

Jeff Dallas told me that his Drosophyllum and some Drosera under red-blue LEDs would produce bizarre foliage, twisted and irregular, and speculated that plants appreciating higher light intensity dislike red/blue-only spectra. Perhaps putting the cape sundews under white LEDs would help? Red/Blue lights work excellent for neps, possibly because many of them are partial-shade-growing lianas.

In my experience, Red-Blue LEDs for drosera tends to irregularly cause weird foliage. I have red capensis under such lights in my setup but they are only just sprouting from root cuttings. I'll see if they produce weird foliage in the future.

I wonder if that might be a result of too high of a blue light ratio. Blue light acts primarily as a growth regulator in plants and some plants can react very poorly to too much blue (too little generally causes etiolation, even under intense light.) This is the first I've heard of growth deformities in CPs under red/blue lights though.
 
So I moved the the cape sundew and the D.adelae to where I'm growing my Nepenthes. They're currently under 4 T8 fluorescents and already seem happier there. I trimmed a lot of the warped growth off. I left the D. binata where it was since it seemed to like the light so much.

I think I figured something out. So the Maxsisun 300w LED has two dials. One for blue light and one for red. You can basically adjust the intensity for each set of blue or red LEDs. I figured since a lot of people grow carnivorous plants under 6500 K fluorescent lights and the color temperature of those lights is mostly blue then it should make sense to grow the plants under mostly blue light. Apparently this is the exact opposite of how to you should grow most plants under LED lights. I guess the appropriate ratio for normal growth under an LED is pretty much 10:1 of red:blue. I just flipped to intensity. I'll see how the D. binata responds. The other two plants are too messed up for me to even think about putting them back. I'll take some cuttings when they're healthy and see what happens when the cuttings establish themselves as adults.
 
The 6,500K lights I use for my Aquatics look warm white. But reds are preferred over blues for water weeds. Don’t know if this translates for CPs ?


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