Quote Originally Posted by sheist
heres a curve ball

can anyone try an addition to this experiment if the uv-b light was color screened to filter out the blue? i've dabbled with photography and color gels to filter out certain lights to get that 'perfect' effect in some shoots, i figure the concept should be relative in this particular case.. if this could be accomplished, perhaps we'll be able to see the true effects of uv-b without spectral influence
Hello sheist, you raise an interesting point about the use of filters. Almost all of the scientific research dealing with plant photosynthesis was done useing filters. A paper done in '98 dealing with pulsing LEDs (5mm diodes back then) used a 668nm LED that showed abt 660nm was optimum for photosynthesis, and got me real excited because they did not use filters.

Here for our purposes it would be difficult to filter blues out since some blue is necessary for plant growth. Also there is a possiblity that some UVa or UVc may be helpfull not just the UVb, and that would be ok by me. We pretty much can only grow with what's available to us. Using an all LED grow light, with and without UVb diodes might be the only method to better define the effects of UVb.

But if someone wants to step up with an experiment using filters, I'm interested.