February 28, 2023
Is it possible to get the best LED grow lights online that will perform well enough to support your garden through the winter? The answer to this question is yes! You don’t have to be rich to enjoy the benefits of grow lights. There are a variety of grow lights to choose from. Options you can take advantage of at very friendly prices. Depending on the type of garden you have and the plants you want to grow, you can get the grow lights you need without breaking your pocket.
How Commercial Grow Lights Work
LED garden light fixtures represent a giant leap forward in the evolution of commercial grow lights. Growing plants with LED lights is easier than using traditional high pressure sodium lights because LEDs provide the full spectrum of visible light rather than a limited number of wavelengths. Here’s a quick primer on how plant grow bulbs work:
Plants need sunlight, water and air to thrive. In indoor environments, temperature fluctuations and water supply issues can affect plant growth — but poor-quality lighting can kill. The best commercial grow light options offer a careful combination of red, blue, and green light wavelengths in one easy-to-control system. In response to all three grow light colors, plants tend to grow taller, denser, and faster for a healthier bottom line.
ECO Farm MB3 Pro 760W LM301B LED Grow Light
Features:
High efficiency + high yield ECO Farm LED grow light is equipped with tWith 2880 pcs SAMSUNG LM301B diodes+80 Osram 660nm, with high PAR/PPF efficiency up to 2.8 umol/J and powerful output, enabling you to Obtain higher output. Only consumes 760W. The ultra-thin and unique 180° foldable design grow light is easy to stretch or fold. It is very suitable for large-area planting and commercial planting. The perfect coverage area is 4*6 feet. Both sides can be folded freely from 0° to 180°, easy to install, save space, and easy to carry, no need to worry about hurting hands and lights. The dimming knob is ideal for growers to adjust the light intensity according to different growing stages., which provides the needs of each stage of the plant, allows the plant to obtain the perfect growth effect flexibly, increase the yield, and save energy costs at the same time.
Mammoth Lighting Fold Series MF08 LED Grow Light
Features:
The Mammoth LED grow lights are built with high-quality Samsung diodes. The lights encompass a continuous range of wavelength from blue and green to red, creating a light blend matching the natural sunlight. 469 Samsung LM301B diodes per bar delivers the industry’s Highest PPFD and Yield. Mammoth customized their light spectrum to optimize plant growth and increase yields while consuming less energy and reducing operating costs compared with traditional horticulture technologies. With a proprietary blend of 3000k+5000k+660nm+730nm, for full cycle growth. 730nm speeds up flower (~5 days) and adds up to 5% more yield. Up to 5x5 flower coverage, 7x7 veg coverage. Strategically designed bars/spacing delivering more even lighting coverage (and growth) over a 5'x5'.
Intensity
The intensity of the light is measured in watts per square foot. A good rule of thumb is that you want at least 100 watts per square foot if you are growing anything other than leafy greens. If the light doesn’t say the intensity, it’s a good idea to ask for a sample before purchase so you can test it out.
While there are no doubt that grow light spectrum is important, some studies suggest that even more important than spectrum is light intensity. There are a number of ways of measuring the intensity of a grow light — some good and others bad.
Wattage
Choosing the wattage of a light is one of the most important considerations when buying a grow light. Here’s some guidelines to help you find what type of light you need.
This is the most common measure of grow light intensity and is a measure of electricity (watt = amp x volt). This measure can be misleading, though. Some manufacturers (the better ones) give the actual wattage the unit uses — the wall plug wattage. Others, typically lesser brands, will give you the max wattage rating of the LED diodes. To use a simple example, a grow light could call itself 90 watt if it has thirty 3 watt LED’s, however, it is common practice to run LED’s at half wattage to reduce heat production (and therefore heatsink cost) and increase efficiency. So, what was called a 90w grow light could really be 45w (or less!).
Bottom line, you want actual power draw, not LED wattage rating. It can be good to be suspicious of overly round numbers — you are likely getting the diode rating and not the actual power draw. Knowing the wattage of the diodes isn’t useless, though. You will get a heck of a lot more light out of a 3 watt diode run at 1 watt than a 1 watt diode run at 1 watt.
PPF
LED grow lights are the newest type of light on the market. They tend to be more efficient than other types of lights, which means you can use them for longer periods of time before they need a break. For example, if you’re using a traditional HID light that has a ppf rating of 400 (meaning it outputs 400 μmol/m2/sec), then in 10 hours you’ll use up all the energy from one bulb.
PPF (Photosynthetic Photon Flux) measures the total amount of light produced by a grow light in terms of micromoles of photons produced per second (often written as umol/s or μmol/s). This is an important number because unlike PPFD (which will be explained below) it can’t be manipulated and tells you the full amount of light coming from the LED grow light.
PPFD
The first thing you need to think about when buying a grow light is the type of grow light you need. There are two types of LED lights — those that use red and blue LEDs, and those that use white LEDs. You may want one over the other depending on what kind of plant you’re growing. A PPFD (Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density) tells you how many photons a given light produces per second in each nanometer of space.
PPFD (Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density) measures the amount of micromoles of photons striking a square meter per second (often written as umol/m2/s, μmol/m2/s, or μmolm-2s-1).
Full daylight sun at noon in the summer is around 2000 μmol/m2/s. What your plants actually need, however, is likely to be much less than that. Infact, because the Sun’s intensity is only that bright for a small portion of the day and because the angle of that intensity changes throughout the day, providing that much light for an extended period of time would very likely be damaging to your plant. A ‘light response curve’ shows how effectively a plant utilizes light at differing intensities. Depending on the plant, at levels greater than 800–1000 μmol/m2/s the efficiency that a plant uses the light starts to slow. Meaning, you can provide your plant more light than this, but you might not see a huge change in outcome.
It’s worth noting that some LED companies can increase their PPFD numbers by measuring extremely close to the grow light or using spot-light like reflectors or lenses. An LED company should always report what distance their PPFD numbers were taken at (e.g., 24 in, etc.).
PAR
What type of grow light do you need? You need a specific type of light depending on the stage in which your plants are. Some LED lights are designed for seedlings, some for flowering and others for use when plants are about 3–4 weeks old. The best way to decide is by looking at the manufacturer’s label or by speaking with an expert from a reputable garden centre.
This is not a measurement at all, but instead, a type of light that can be absorbed by plants (and coincidentally seen by humans). It ranges from 400 to 700nm.
Lumens
One of the most important things you need to decide when buying a light is what type of grow light you need. Lumens are a measure of brightness, but they don’t tell the whole story — because it’s really about PAR (Photosynthetically Active Radiation). The best way to find out how many lumens you need is to look at the spectrum that your light emits. There are two types of PAR- Full Spectrum and Broad Spectrum.
This is a measure of the total apparent brightness of a light source and not how many photons are produced. As the cliche goes, “lumens are for humans.” You can think of it as the brightness of a single candle (although the real definition is more complex). By in large, lumens are not a useful measure of light intensity for plants since they overweight colors like green and underweight reds and blues. For instance, 1W of radiant flux at 550nm (green, which the human eye is very sensitive to) is 675 lumens. One watt of radiant flux at 660nm (deep red) is only 45 lumens. The red light will be more easily absorbed by your plant in photosynthesis than the green one, but your eye will see the green light as 15 times brighter than the red light!
Lux/Footcandle
These measure how much brightness is striking a unit of area. Contrast this with lumen which is the total amount of brightness coming from the light source in all directions. Lux = one lumen per meter squared. Footcandle = one lumen per foot squared.
Spectrum
Photosynthesis — You need to choose a light that caters to the energy production of your plants. The McCree curve and absorption peaks of photopigments are worth researching to learn more about this.
Photomorphogenesis — ‘Photo’ means ‘light’, ‘morpho’ means ‘shape,’ ‘genesis’ can be translated as ‘creation of.’ So, it’s using light to create a certain plant shape. Light can do a lot more than just change the growth pattern of a plant, though. It can trigger or delay flowering and fruiting, change chemical composition, among other diverse reactions.
So you want to start your journey as a houseplant lover. But the question is what are the right, necessary steps to make sure your new green friend has enough lighting in your apartment or house to sustain healthy growth.
Don’t worry — we’ve provided some advice above to help you start creating the perfect healthy environment by choosing the best grow lights for your houseplants!
October 20, 2023