Colored Up Bromeliads

I think everyone with a "glass box" knows what it's like to have inferior lighting at some point, usually when you first get into the hobby.  The most obvious symptom of this is having colorful bromeliads that "green out" once they've been under inadequate lighting for long enough.

I had this problem for a number of years when running stock, off the shelf lights from the local Big Box pet store.  Those were all based on under powered T8 and T5 florescent tubes.  I switched to the store bought LED lighting when it first became available in those same stores, but that was only marginally better and usually expensive.

Once I got into designing my own lights I finally started to get much better results with all the colorful bromeliads.  Fireballs now look like their name.  Super Fireballs have a lot of red, and so many others broms finally look like the sales photos when in my glass boxes.  Old greened out ones will color back up in time, once they're under the proper lighting.

A big part of that success was adding the red and blue diodes to create a custom LED strip product.   The following photos are not great (some are shot through glass or screen vents), but they show the kind of color that we all should be getting when you choose to grow the colorful bromeliad species and their hybrids.