Welcome to Botanical LEDs. Botanical LEDs started with myself, Jeff Young, and my wife, Nicole Young. We have been growing plants and orchids for some time now in our home. In 2016 we had 6 great southeast facing windows and most everything we tried to grow in front of those windows did very well.

We were excited with the results growing there. But when we expanded our collection to other parts of the house the plants struggled to get the correct amount of light. You could see by the leaves that something was missing. They would put out good roots and reward us with a new leaf or two, but they weren’t thriving and lacked the vigor the other plants in the window displayed. They also failed to bloom every year on a regular schedule like you would expect.

We realized at this point that all things were equal except for lighting. We were using the same water, fertilizer, and the temps were the same. The lack of good lighting was the difference. So, the mission to get them good lighting began.

Our first thought was to order some LEDs from Amazon and eBay. That’s precisely what we did. In fact, we ordered over 27 different LEDs over several months trying to get exactly what we wanted. But it didn’t work for the way we had our plants set up.

We were using backers’ racks with 2-3 shelves per rack to grow our plants on. The racks were 48” wide and 18” deep and 16-20” or so inches between the shelves. That meant we needed a LED that would evenly cover the entire shelf with minimum hot and cold spots. Many of the LEDs we bought at 16” above the shelf would cover to small of a footprint meaning we would have to get 4 or more LEDs to cover the entire shelf evenly driving up the cost of lighting for each shelf and making it cost prohibitive.

We also found what most manufactures advertise for their watts is very deceptive. For example, we bought one LED from eBay and the seller stated that it was 300 watts. We thought great this will work well. After buying it we tested the amount of actual draw from our outlet only to find out that it was 119 actual watts, and it had a fan in the fixture that was also using part of those 119 watts meaning that the plants would even get less than the 119 watts.

This is very typical when sellers are advertising watts. What we have found is most of them advertise what they call “equivalent watts” meaning if it was a bulb and not and LED this is how many watts it would be using. That doesn’t help us when we want to use a specific number of watts. It becomes confusing very fast.

This entire process took months of our time to buy these LEDs, try them, test them, and then order the next one to try and solve our issue of evenly distributing light over the shelf of plants. We were getting very frustrated. What we were doing just wasn’t working at all.

This process lead us to finally say “if we could have anything we wanted what would we want to evenly cover our grow space and do it most efficiently?” We came up with the idea of LEDs over the entire length of the shelf. We ended up having to use 2 LEDs per shelf because the light comes out of the lens of the LED at 120-degree angle. Because of the height of the LEDs above the plants you need 2 LEDs to evenly cover the shelf without having hot and cold spots.

Now we were on a mission to build our own LEDs. We knew what we needed to have so we set out to get it. Late 2018 we ordered 60 custom LED fixtures. Our first order. The design worked very well. Just like we had planed 2 LEDs evenly cover the entire shelf nicely.

Having made the first 60 we discovered there was a lot more work to be done. We wanted something waterproof since we are working with plants, water, and electric, we wanted them to daisy chain together, so we have less cords to deal with, we also wanted them efficient as possible, so we are not wasting energy, and we didn’t want them putting off a lot of heat or burning the plants. Most importantly we also needed the best spectrum possible so that our plants would bloom and grow healthy. After all that is why we are growing them right?

Since 2018 we have made over 5 revisions to what we originally started with improving our LEDs each time with small tweaks here and there. We believe we produce the premier LEDs available in the market today for indoor growing of orchids, African Violets, succulents, carnivorous plants, all houseplants, flasks of orchids, and even vegetables. If it is green our LEDs will grow it.

We believe our LEDs are the best. We use them for our own diverse collection because we do believe them to be the best LEDs you can buy for indoor growing.

We strive to have the best LEDs and as technology keeps changing, we will stay on top of it and incorporate it into our next production of LEDs. That is what we did

when we started adding the far-red spectrum into our LEDs. The 730 nm part of the spectrum. You won’t find that in any big box store LEDs. The far-red helps with getting the plant to bloom faster and grow larger. These are just the little things we put into our LEDs that make them better than our competitors.

Botanical LEDs is now myself Jeff Young, my wife Nikki Young, my brother Jason who does most of the shipping and my father Roy who helps with everything. We have now manufactured and sold over 10,000 LEDs.

Many hobbyists have used them use them and love them. They have been
heavily tested by many growers over the years now. I hope you will also give our
LEDs a try and come to love them the way everyone does. Let’s Grow Together!