Just a reminder driven home to me by the color of Tomato Hornworms during the daylight… Use the UV light at nighttime and they fluoresce making for easy pickin’s. Other things fluoresce also, but you’ll figure it out.
I must have picked 6-8 off during the daylight today, but tonight I found another 12 or more. Frankly I wasn’t counting and won’t until I dump out the tumbler of drowned caterpillars tomorrow. They just can’t hide when they fluoresce brightly against the dark foliage. I even found some hiding under the leaves of the hot peppers. They always are on the undersides of whatever they latch onto.
Yup you’re right a UV filter would block all of the light from a white light flashlight, so logic would dictate that someone is missing something. Nothing fluoresces in the absence of light that I know of unless it produces it’s own light, but I don’t think that’s called fluorescing, maybe it is. So clearly something is wrong, as you pointed out.
Maybe I was bluffing the worms and that caused them to light up? Or maybe I’m like Tommy the Pinball Wizard and I do it by intuition?
The subject of the thread is UV lights in the nighttime garden. Convoy makes (or made) a S2+ UV light. That is what I have the filter on. Heck I also mentioned that I have the filter on it to make it look like a UV light when it’s turned off, and not to make it into a UV light while being a white light producing light. Without it from what I remember it just looked like a white light flashlight and I have other S2+ lights in white light flavor that it could get confused with.
So no, I wasn’t kidding, but I was in part of this response because I just couldn’t take it all that seriously.
Hi. The way I read this is that you have the UV model of the Convoy S2+, and have added a filter that blocks visible light but passes UV light through. I see the filter on some of the store sites - does it replace the regular glass lens? As in, the pill gets unscrewed, the glass lens is replaced by the UV filter, and the pill is screwed back in?
You are correct. I have no idea if the lights are still made and the UV filter, while not required, sets it apart. FWIW, I remember the filter actually not being needed. I did it just to differentiate it from the white light models. For the little $ it cost it was a no-brainer.
I don’t remember the actual mechanics of the lens swap (it’s been awhile), but I was able to do it so it was easy.
LH, let me know if the hornworms in CA are the same as in Maine. Dead leaves and flower buds and such also fluoresce, but you’ll figure that out pretty fast. “My” worms are distinctively shaped. FWIW, I also found some on the hot peppers and NOTHING eats the hot peppers, but they were touching the tomatoes.
’Though I got an old UV-dye kit (checking leaking oil, AC refrigerant, etc.) whose “UV” light is a 50W halogen spotlight but with a silvered-glass filter on it. There’s enough UV content from halogen lights to actually cause UV dye to fluoresce.
Even my cheapo ’501B with P90 UV drop-in blows it away, though.
