How much heat do LED grow lights produce?

LED Grow Light do produce heat

Every light produces heat. It does not matter if the light comes from a bulb, diode, or a star like our sun; they all produce heat. LEDs provide a more efficient means for converting energy to light than other methods and therefore produce less heat.

While LEDs generate heat, there are important differences between traditional lighting technology and full spectrum LED grow lights:

HID grow lights require heat to produce light by arcing electricity through selected gasses, making them extremely hot, to the point the gasses glow. This means HID bulbs themselves are extremely hot-- hot enough to start a fire, and many gardens have gone up in flames because of this danger. LEDs' electroluminescence technology is entirely different and does not require heat to produce light; full spectrum LED grow lights themselves will not get hot enough to start a fire.

Much of the energy used by HID lights is emitted as infrared light (above 800 nanometers). This "light" is not usable by plants and only works to warm up the leaves -- and everything else under the light. This is why HID light feels warm on your skin, while LED light does not. Our LED grow lights don't waste energy creating unusable and detrimental infrared light; all the energy goes toward growing your plants.

Because LEDs aren't wasting energy producing light plants can't use, we can use less energy overall to get the same (or better!) growth from plants. Less energy consumed means less heat; for a given growing area, LED lights will put off less heat than any equivalent artificial light.

So new lighting technologies, such as LEDs generate light more efficiently, or with higher efficacy. We get more lumens per watt; however, heat per watt of electricity is constant. Fewer watts are used to produce equal brightness, not that LED light fixtures produce less heat for the wattage that they consume.

Calculating Grow Light Heat Production

Also, calculating the amount of heat your grow light produces is easy. You simply take the total amount of watts used (the wall plug wattage) and multiply it by 3.41 to get the total BTUs produced per hour. (BTUs or British thermal units are a standard heat measurement within the HVAC industry and one BTU is roughly equal to the heat produced by one 4 in long match). As stated earlier, this is true regardless of what kind of light it is – LED, HPS, MH, or any other.Therefore, a 1,000W HPS grow light (1,060W with ballast loss) generates 3,617 BTU per hour heat. A 500W LED grow light (550W with driver loss) generates approximately 1,877 BTU per hour heat.

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