How to Make Your Own DIY Indoor Grow Lights

Whether you’re a home gardener or you dream of runing a market farm, you’re likely going to want to start a few of your seeds indoors. And if you start your seeds indoors, something that will make your life so much easier (and allow for big, healthy, strong seedlings) is this easy DIY indoor grow light stand. While grow lights aren’t necessary for getting seeds to germinate, plenty of light is essential for growing seedlings, and the best way to provide that is with a good quality indoor grow light.

If you have big windows and get a lot of natural light, depending on the light intensity, you may be able to get away with growing without additional artificial lights. However, grow lights will almost always be your best option for giving your seedlings and indoor plants a strong start. Not only do they give off way more light than you could probably even get through a large window during seed starting season in the late winter/early spring, but it’s also an easy way to help keep your plants warm without overheating them (another crucial part of seed starting).

You don’t really want to keep certain heat-loving seedlings near a drafty, cold window in the winter and early spring when they’re just starting out, because they could die if they get too cold. Similarly, putting them directly near a heat source like a heating vent or wood stove can dry out the soil and provide too much heat to them. Grow lights offer the right balance of artificial light and warmth that comes as close as possible to natural sunlight.

One option, of course, is to buy LED grow lights that come with pre-made stands online or from your local garden store. But some of these can get pretty pricey, depending upon the size and scale of your growing needs. Plus, if a bulb burns out, you usually have to replace the entire light fixture, which can become quite costly in the long term.

Another option, however, is to buy standard tube fluorescent lights from any home improvement store or order them online and use them as grow lights. They offer the same type of light intensity that’s needed for indoor growing and work in much the same way. However, you will need to mount them to some sort of stand or fixture on your own.  We use these metal shelving units for our indoor seed starting, and we attach long fluorescent lights to them and have great success with our seedlings every spring!

How we made our DIY Indoor Grow Light Stand

These shelving units are really affordable and you can usually get them at Costco, IKEA or Amazon. When you’re not seed starting, you can use them for storage. I use one of ours for all of our Mason jars and lids, bottles and growlers and our two canners, and I store our garden, BBQ and picnic stuff, pet supplies and first aid kit on the other.

We’re able to get about 50-60 seedlings on each shelf and have two units with 4 shelves each, so we’re technically able to grow up to 400 seedlings on both these units. And we also need to account for the extra growing space we’ll need as the seedlings grow (tomatoes especially often need to be transplanted into larger pots before they’re ready to be transplanted outdoors).

Here’s what we did:

• We gathered our lights (we use one 4-foot T8 fluorescent light fixture per shelf)
• Next, we attached the light fixtures to the underside of the shelves with some bailing wire (you can use any type of wire, metal chains, or zap-straps are a good idea too).
• We attached some foil lining to help reflect the light and keep warmth in the growing area and voilà! We’ve got our own DIY growing stand capable of starting roughly 200 seedlings!

Choosing lights for indoor growing

One thing you should keep in mind when choosing grow lights is that you need to choose lights with the right colour temperature for what you’re growing. When we made our original growing stand, we purchased “Soft Light” and “Daylight” fluorescent lights to add to our existing “Natural Light” bulbs. When we researched the best type of bulb to use, “Natural Light” (or 5,000K) was touted as the best option because of its neutral hue on the light colour spectrum. However, adding the “Soft Light” (3,000K) and “Daylight” (6,500K) bulbs gives off a broader spectrum of light to enhance growing conditions, so we decided to use a combination of these lights when we expanded our growing stand from one to three lights.

The colour temperature of the lights matters for indoor growing as the different colours trigger different responses in plants. For example, red lights trigger the flowering process, while lights that are more blue in colour trigger vegetative growth. The “Natural Lights” were a good first choice and happy medium as they fall in the neutral “middle” of the colour spectrum. The “Soft Light” bulbs are 3,000K (red) and the “Daylight” bulbs are 6,500K, making them a distinct blue light.

The lights you choose will ultimately depend on what types of plants you’re using them for, but assuming you’re growing mostly vegetables, you’ll probably want to lean more toward the blue end of the spectrum, whereas flowering plants will require more red light. If you’re not sure, I would recommend going for a 5,000K bulb since this is a happy medium.

You can also use LED grow lights. LED lights are becoming more popular as they contain the full spectrum of light colours in a single fixture, so they’re specifically tailored to growing plants. They also produce very little heat, which is ideal to avoid accidentally burning or drying out your plants.

In the end, the choice is yours, and that’s the great part about making your own DIY indoor grow light stand! It’s entirely customizable to your needs and your space, right down to the height of the light shelves and the number of indoor seeds that you start each year.

What about you? Are you starting seeds indoors this year? What are your garden plans? Let me know in the comments below! Oh, and don’t forget to download the Seed Starting Cheat Sheet from my FREE Resource Library and take the guesswork out of starting 10 common garden vegetables from seed so you can start growing your own organic food at home today!

Wishing you a strong head start on the growing season 🙂

Wanna learn how to grow your own food?

Let’s face it: food costs are skyrocketing and only continuing to go up. Growing your own food is basically like printing your own money! Not to mention how much healthier and better-tasting it is. And you might be surprised by just how much food you can grow in a relatively small space.

But if you’re new to gardening, it can feel intimidating to get started. I know, because I was once a beginner who had NO CLUE what I was doing—and I made plenty of mistakes that cost me both time and money along the way.

Over the past 10+ years, I’ve learned how to feed my family from our backyard (well… front yard, actually!) on our modest quarter-acre property. Today, I grow hundreds of pounds of food for our family every year for practically free. Yes, there are some startup costs—but they pay big dividends for years to come. Investing in a garden is just about the smartest investment you can make nowadays!

If you’re ready to make that investment in your family’s food security, I’d love to invite you to join me inside my signature program, Seed-to-Soil.

Inside the course, I’ll teach you step-by-step exactly how to grow your own food from seed and create your very own organic grocery store right in your backyard. From choosing the right seeds and starting them successfully, to planting, harvesting, and even saving seeds for the following season, you’ll learn the simple, proven system I’ve used to grow abundant food year after year.

If you’re ready to stop relying entirely on the grocery store and start growing real food for your family, click here to enroll in Seed-to-Soil today.

I can’t wait to see you inside:)

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