This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 1:35 am and is filed under Cost Savings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Ever since purchasing my AeroGarden I have wondered about the 6 month recommendation. You see in the instruction guide we are instructed to change our grow bulbs every 6 months. Now that is perfectly reasonable but I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe they could be used longer.
Now before I continue I should warn you that I cannot guarantee that everyone will have the same results as I did so please don’t blame me if your plants are affected.
Well I did some research into the types of bulbs and how they are affected over time. It turns out that compact fluorescent bulbs generally last upwards of 15,000 hours and after 5 years output roughly 70-80% of the light they produced when they were first used.
So I decided to test this information out for myself, since my bulbs were already near the 6 month mark I simply left them in and made a weekly record of how my plants were behaving.
I can’t say I noticed any difference in my existing plants, however once I started with a new cherry tomato seed kit it did seem to take an extra week for the plant to start blossoming. Unfortunately when I was growing my first seed kit I didn’t think to keep careful notes so these results are very subjective.
Ultimately the cherry tomato plant’s grew well though the plant never seemed quite as fast growing, but the tomato’s don’t taste any different and the plants aren’t dieing. So I do believe you could use your AeroGarden grow bulbs for about a year without causing problems for your plants.
