in my local growshop, mylar is £4 for a 1m length, 1.75 metres wide.

but.....

in my local pound shop, they sell mylar emergency blankets, 1m x 2m for a pound!


its a good bit thinner than the real stuff, but every bit as shiny and reflective, all the same once its stapled to the walls .

feels like viz top tips now

¿Matt white paint?

Whenever im at a festival and someone has those mylar things on their tents I think about growing loadsabud......

¿Go to a marathon/disaster that's being held near you and pick up all the discarded/surplus 'space blankets'.

great idea! its nearly a year until our next marathon, so i'll have to hope for a disaster then

you could always cause one yourself

White foam core board is better and can be had for free if you know where to look. Art galleries throw it away and convention center throw away a ton of it after every convention.

Light weight and easy to cut with a razor box knife. The reflected light has no hot spots unlike mylar. If you do go for a Mylar like material, the dimpled stuff works better than non dimpled.

A length of Aluminium foil, for just pennies, does the job wonderfully.

Works beautifully for me, and has done for years, highly reflective, wAAAAAAAy cheaper than anything else, and you can buy it anywhere.

Hey Doris, love your title!!!

I never heard of anyone who actually uses tinfoil! Did anyone see Top Buzzer on MTV a few years back, in one of the episode he had a little growbox lined with tinfoil

I cannot believe that people on this forum are still advocating that BS !!

If I were to take the very accurately made paraboloid mirror out of my Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, and position it carefully at precisely its focal length from a plant, I might, with a great deal of luck, be able to focus the IR radiation from a lamp onto a plant and create a ´hot spot´.

No way could I begin to do that with any randomly created creases on a bit of aluminium. This ´hot spot´ nonsense is spouted by people who have never used aluminium foil, and who have never experienced these socalled ´hotspots´- because it doesn´t happen!! I have used aluminium foil for years - probably before Doris was born - with great success, mostly on cacti seedlings. Hot spots do not exist, it is an Old Wives´Tale.

Nobody has actually made TIN foil for years. It was replaced by aluminium foil decades ago.

Is there not a table kicking about that shows the reflectivity of diamond mylar, mylar, white matt paint ?

There is somewhere. Mylar is tops, but MUCH cheaper alternatives are not far behind. Not that your plants will notice much difference between 98% and 95% reflectivity..

Let me try this again then.

I never heard of anyone who actually uses ALUMINUM foil! Did anyone see Top Buzzer on MTV a few years back, in one of the episode he had a little growbox lined with ALUMINUM foil


I cant see that using ALUMINUM foil is cheaper than using white paint.

i have always heard ally foil's relectivity was crap even compared to white painted walls , why bother with it ?