I think these "gadjets" are too small and way over-priced.

Go to Home Depot and you can get a shop lamp -Grow light for $40 - $50

T8 fluorescent lighting is pretty much lowest cost, but some LED lights are getting close.

You will outgrow a 2foot long light pretty quickly, so go for 4' if you have the space.

Along with your seeds you can overwinter temp sensitive cutting like Coleus and make some Orchids happy.

too small and way over-priced

The TV ads show Bed, Bath & Beyond as a source, I went to the one here and all they had was the ugly, cheap looking mostly black mid-sized model - for $100! "Regularly $150!!"

Costco has a 4 ft. LED shop light for $20 this month.

Thank you for the great advice..I will check out the

the home depot/costco ones

And you have to buy the seed starters from the company. If you look at the illustration, they use a special pod that you stick in the contraption and it looks difficult to make your own. $$ suck!. Good idea to follow the advice given!

If you "love growing from seeds" probably you need something much bigger than the units you asked about anyway. And these are hydroponic setups, where the plants spend their entire lives in the unit, suspended in water - and not something that would be used to grow transplants for use outdoors later, in flower and vegetable beds.

Costco has a 4 ft. LED shop light for $20 this month.

IMO, save yourself from the post holiday return line and don't bother with this one. We bought one of these earlier this year. It is so cheaply made the light flickered, in a quick and constant manner. So annoying! The light went right back to Costco.

Has anyone tried the led bulbs made to replace long fluorescent tubes ? they are the same size/shape.

Yes, we just replaced all our 4 ft fluorescent tubes with LED lights from superbrightleds.com ! (They often have per cent off sales if you sign up)

Part Number: T8-NW18F-4PK comes in 3 different hues. Supposedly you can just plug n play these tubes but we had multiple issues (not with the tubes). Watched a bunch of Youtube videos and ended up rewiring to bypass the ballast box. Wonderful company with wonderful products. Reviews and photos and chat support very helpful. (I'm a big Costco shopper but not a fan of Feit brand.)

This really depends, i live in zone 5, so i have to get seeds started indoors or the growing season is too short to do much with. That said, i don't have a lot of space to allocate to seed starting, and something like this doesn't look terrible sitting out on a kitchen counter.

If you are new to growing, the simplicity of using an Aerogarden is a good way to learn and be motivated to expand. Yes, there is of course a cost to it, anything "easy" that "works" is going to have a cost.

I have one of their Bounty models with the seed starter kit, found it on Amazon on sale and picked it up to try. I already had built my own seed starting box with LED growlights, mylar coating the inside of the box, and a heated seed starting mat. But this setup requires that i water every other day, and unfortunately, in the early spring/late winter I usually have to travel for work, so i can't use this for starting seeds as early as i would like. The Aerogarden easily solves this for me, with the seed starting kit, i get the ability to let this run for about 2 weeks before it needs to have water added to the system.

As for the system itself, once you get past the price, it works. My first run i started 15 bell peppers and 35 chilies. 100% germination on the bell peppers and 83% on the chilies. germination occurred in about 3-5 days, by the 14th day the first true leaves on most plants had fully opened.