What a great way to fight back against industrial farming: Increased electricity consumption instead of sunlight, and petroleum-based containers!
How about covering sites discussing rooftop/window gardens, household aquaponics, or indoor vertical gardens?
You just can’t make everybody happy.
You can’t grow the things people are growing in these in window gardens.
i’ve been thinking about builds like this for awhile, and the linked ones look great. the biggest advantage is to use specific wave lengths of light to get the right behavior of your plants when natural light isn’t quite right–i.e. conducive to vegetation, flowering, germination, etc. i built something similar to this a few years ago to grow veg in a dark apartment, and while when all was said and done i had some very nice $4/each beets and greens, it was a satisfying endeavor 
the next project, since i am no longer in an apartment, is a proper insulated/vented greenhouse.
Yea. My first thought was “This doesn’t look efficient at all.”
But I have no problem with recycling the plastic containers.
These are clever, but I have a hard time believing they’re being used for cherry tomatoes or basil.
If you are in northern areas, close to the polar circle, even these could be grown there. Nothing better for the kitchen than fresh herbs around the year!
Yes. You can get a heap of LED grow lights these days and some of those builds seem to use those instead of CFLs. The LED lights usually include a combination of different LEDs that you can adjust for the differing grow cycles.
shaddack has one of the legitimate use cases: in climates that are too cold to grow stuff. The other is in very urban places with poor air quality such as Tokyo. They burn garbage there. Do you want burnt garbage particles on/in your cherry tomatoes or weed?
Why don’t you post some of those?
I had a decent year job-wise a while back and purchased a 260 watt vegetative version of this. 
Ironically it wasn’t because it was too cold outside, it was summer in Arizona :). Growing greens when it is 116F fed my stomach and soul :D.
Gee, their “harvest compendium” list is entirely composed of one herb.
Guess which one!
This reminds me of the old Phototron system.
Being an eco-tech tinkerer going back into childhood, I had long wanted one of these but for many years they remained obscenely expensive–at least from a teenager’s perspective–and so I turned my attention to making bubbler systems from buckets and flood-drain or drip-irrigation units from industrial containers. (bubblers are great kids projects, and easily made from parts scrounged at the usual Goodwill) It never occurred to me that you might use 5 gallon buckets as an enclosure like this. they seemed far too small, particularly given the amount of heat produced by the usual grow lighting–but then this was before the advent of small cheap CFLs and LEDs. This is like PC-modding for stoners. I often say that if it wasn’t for pot the technology of hydroponics might have been forgotten.
Nothing that can not be solved by an activated-carbon filter. Growers usually have it on the air egress, to suppress the telltale smell, but it can be as well placed on the air ingress to remove the external pollutants.
Also, plants that are not legal are not necessarily an illegitimate use of the device. Who has the authority to decide what is legitimate or not? Illegal doesn’t mean automatically bad, as well as legal doesn’t automatically translate to good.
Indoor growing under high-efficiency LED lights has also a good potential for food production in urban areas. The production capacity for multilayer growing per built-up area is quite surprising.
/want!
Agreed.
I was more talking about the suggestions of using roof gardens or window boxes which (obviosuly) aren’t as easy to filter. I have friends who like their fungi so I’m acquainted with the benefits of filtration 
Screw you microscopic organisms!
Who has the authority to decide what is legitimate or not?
You could not be righter.
OK, one person gets it.
Legalization- its good for the environment too.
They are neat :D. I also have some T5s that I got for free, but it is the ventilation, temp, and light color factors that are the hardest. I was growing orchids for awhile and natural sun, if it was an option, was always better.
BTW, free industrial reject T5s are great for keeping areas bright, but not great for plants. I used to have a greenhouse brighter than Venus, but it made no difference. Next time it will be done right
Botrytis and sciarabid fly are my personal enemies… 
