This IKEA HEKTAR Floor Lamp Hack Will Instantly Improve Your Green Thumb
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Whether you're just starting your plant-raising journey or you seem to have a stubbornly brown thumb, you may need a little help cultivating your leafy companions. If you feel like your plants could use a boost, the issue might not be the amount you're watering them but rather the amount of sun they get. Unfortunately, not everyone is blessed with south-facing windows, and dim rooms deserve a little life and greenery, too. There is a workaround for this predicament, and it entails choosing the perfect grow lights. If you have (or want to get) the popular IKEA HEKTAR floor lamp, you can easily transform it into a stylish grow-light display, as demonstrated in a TikTok from user @botanicallybe.
Some apparatuses made for this purpose might throw off your room's carefully curated aesthetic, but in just a few steps, you can transform the IKEA staple into your very own grow-light kit. The lamp retails for $149, and it comes with three heads, meaning you can light three house plants. Each head is height-adjustable, allowing you to move it up or down to accommodate each plant's size. You can also adjust each head's angle. Here's how to transform your floor lamp into a helpful grow light for struggling plants.
How to transform the HEKTAR into a grow light
Once your lamp is set up, choose three houseplants. Assess each one's height and either drop or raise the lamp heads to make room for them. Make sure you avoid the crucial grow-light mistake of placing your plants too close to the bulbs, as this may burn them.
Next, you'll need to install three small platforms to house your collection. This is where the hack gets a little involved, but even a DIY newbie should be able to pull it off. First, buy a set of wooden shelves — the ones @botanicallybe uses are the Acacia Wood Floating Shelves found on Amazon. You'll then need to purchase conduit clamps from your local hardware store to attach your shelves to the lamp. In their video, the TikTok creator uses Sigma ProConnex Hanger clamps, which you can get for .78 cents apiece at Lowe's.
Screw a conduit clamp into each of the shelves. Use carriage bolts and hex nuts to attach the clamps to the lamp's central pole. The creator used carriage bolts that were ¼" x 1¼" in size, such as this option from Lowe's, and ¼" hex nuts, like this one from Lowe's. They then spray-painted the hardware to match the lamp's color. Once you're finished with these adjustments, just screw in some grow-light bulbs, and you're done!
Finding the right bulbs
The specific grow-light bulbs @botanicallybe used were the Briignite Grow Light Bulbs; a two-pack retails for about $32 on Amazon. Since the IKEA lamp has three lights, you would have to buy two boxes, costing you $64. While these come with a remote control — making them super easy to turn on and off — you can also seek out a more affordable alternative. For example, a three-pack of grow lights from the brand Wiyifada is available for just $20 and has over 5,000 Amazon reviews. This will bring down the total cost of your DIY, making it more budget-friendly.
You might also find that not all grow-light bulbs fit into all lamps. That's because light fixtures can have different socket sizes ranging from E26 (the most common) to E12 (smaller candelabra sockets). As such, light bulbs also come in various sizes. If the specific bulbs you bought don't fit into your IKEA lamp, you don't have to buy new ones — instead, screw adapters into the lamp's sockets so your grow lights will fit. You can get a set of five adapters for $9 on Amazon.