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These are just to help them to grow during the months of no sunlight. Once summer arrives they will be switched off.
I have to fuck around at work with fluorescent tube lighting (I'm a sparky) and I'm not dicking around with them at home.
Like I said LED lighting is making leaps and bounds. I'd don't spec tube lamps anymore, it's cheaper to go for LED.
Mr_Sworld-
Yeah.
In my case they were in a room I don't spend much time in so I'm actually not bothered by the light when I need to go to bed early - so didn't mind the neon lights (also they're really close to the plants and have reflective shielding around so as much of the light reaches them) but sure I do get your point.
salad
What I gathered from a chili nerd forum that winter is that the proper LED lamps (that deliver a suitable spectrum) are quite pricey, so initial outlay is very high for good lamps.
Thus most smaller operations are using tubes which will give even light to a lot of seedlings / small plants (think two or three mounted parallel, 20 cm apart).
Of course if you're just doing one or two plants this makes no sense but I went pretty gung-ho that one winter (and the following summer totally sucked, haha, so a lot of effort and money for nothing)