Adding extra UV to the flowering spectrum used will increase resin and essential oil content in most plants, from lavender to cannabis. It will almost always increase the potency of the flower, but while diminishing the taste/flavor profile just a bit in my experience. Many plants use their resins for the purposes of protecting their DNA from radiation. (as well as many other things)
I tend to always add a few extra individual actinic LED's on their own driver to supplement whatever LED panel im using, whether they have a few UV led's or not.
In an entire 4x4 ill use 6 or 8 additional actinic UV or UVB leds. You can absolutely go too far with UV though, and youll have deformed growth, and if you try and use the plant to breed you may have some unwanted results in the offspring of the plant lol. You can actually see a little bit of the actinic light, but id still recommend wearing sunglasses in the presence of them while on. They arent necessary for quality flower at all, but can absolute increase resin content. Get enough actinic light in an LED's spectrum and the plants perform a bit more like they are under 6500k t5 panels, which imho is a pretty good thing.
With lavender grown under a light, exposing the plant to a good bit of UV will nearly double your essential oil extractions. Ive had some cannabis plants that respond in a very similar way. Lavender is an extreme example though, ime, even adding a single florescent black light to a tent's grow light will increase lavender's resin content.
As for cooking the plants, hook it up, run some tests, check your temps. Just manage temp increases like you normally would
Prob wear sunglasses when in the tent with it on lol. 8 actinic LED's have been negligible when it comes to heat production or burning my plants. As far as UV exposure goes. Maybe test exposure levels on a small potted plant of another species or something lol.
I use the actinic aquarium Reef LED's because in my personal experience, even though they are a good bit lower in UV/b, i get similar results in the resin content departments to using straight UV/b Led's, and the actinic reef LED's seem to be much kinder to my eyes. Cheap and easy to design your own little LED driver circuit for however your grow room is setup, and make sure each plant receives a semi-even level of UV.
Years ago i used UV cold cathode tubes with pretty decent results too. A bit better results then the actinic LED's. But they also break a lot easier and had to hang them lower then the height of the main light which was annoying.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
