Wine cooler build! Help with setup

With low temp, fluorescent light become quite inefficient. On the other hand, efficiency of LED becomes higher with lower temp. So LED is probably better for your application. How big is the enclosure (I can't see the photo)? If it is relatively small, you might want to pay attention to efficiency. In a small area, heat generated by the light becomes an issue. So refrigerator has to work harder. Especially, with Heliamphora, which needs lots of light, this heat issue can be serious if you use cheap inefficient light. If you can do simple DIY-LED (and if you can tell us the size), we might be able to recommend something. And welcome to the forum!

 

I can see it now, it's a pretty tall one. So you are going to hang mounted orchids from the side walls and put Heli at the bottom? Or are you going to make the shelves? How tall is the inside?

I'm guessing that you have to do side lighting similar to what Alfonso did. Did you read his article, which is freely available from The Pleurothallid Alliance Facebook group? So maybe attaching some efficient strips like Philips XF-3535L (link to my blog), XR-3020 (link) or Samsung S-series (link). I haven't checked the recent availability of the later two (these are newer). These are not as cheap as COB, but Large COB won't be a good form factor for your case.

 

Oh, so it is much smaller than how it looks. I'm not completely sure about the dimension, but is if it 6" wide or so with 15" depth or so, probably 2(-3) strips might be a good start. You can drive them with a single driver. I'm growing only 1 species, H. nutans, seedlings, so I don't know what would be the good amount. But they seem to do well with around 200-250 micomol/m^2/s. If you place it really close to the the strip, you can get 300 micomol/m^2/s or so. I don't know how they respond to side lighting. It could be too bright for many orchids, though.

 

Nice.