May 30, 2022
Growing plants indoors needs a lot of care, with particular attention to light and water for your plants. Proper lighting is of paramount importance if you want to grow plants inside your home. Growing indoors has several advantages, resulting in indoor-grown plants having better quality than those grown outdoors. This is a primary reason why plants grown indoors is used for recreational and medicinal purposes.
There are different types of grow lights that you can use to nurture your plants. With the right grow light fixtures, you will be able to improve the THC level of your plants, which enhances the quality of your plants. Growing plants indoors also means you get to control the lighting according to your needs instead of just relying on natural light.
The light spectrum is the different colors (aka wavelength) a source of light can emit. Light is measured in nanometers (nm) and each nanometer represents a band of light (a band of light is a section in the color spectrum). Humans can see a small part of the spectrum, between 380 to 780 nanometers, which means we can only see the colors ranging from violet to red. Even though it appears white, the sun is a full spectrum light source and contains the whole spectral wavelength. That’s why rainbows happen. When raindrops refract light into individual wavelengths you can see all the colors (visible to humans) that make up sunlight.
In nature, plants grow under the sun, receiving the whole spectrum of wavelengths. This means we have to provide the maximum amount of wavelength possible for the best development of our plant. Although it’s not essential, it is considered good to provide the best light spectrum to encourage plant growth. Remember this is not a rule, you can grow your plant from seed to harvest with any light spectrum or amount of light but this can seriously affect your harvest.
Utah State University also conducted research to see how the different spectrums can affect yields,.
Again, there is a difference in yields but is not significant, which means that yes, growing under the right light spectrum will result in slightly better yields and slightly more trichome production but you don’t need to buy a new light, as long as you’re providing enough light and are taking good care of your plants you will still get excellent results.
Mammoth Lighting 10 Bar 740W LED Grow Light
Features:
Mammoth Lighting has been developed by indoor growers over many years of careful experimentation and testing. Scientifically engineered to deliver the highest level of PAR output and balanced Coverage in the LED grow the market. At 1850 µmol/s of PPF, the Mammoth Lighting 10 Bar fixture measures up to the best LED Grow Lights on the market. The Mammoth LED grow lights are built with high-quality Samsung diodes. The lights encompass a continuous range of wavelengths from blue and green to red, creating a light blend matching the natural sunlight. The grow light customized the light spectrum to optimize plant growth and increase yields while consuming less energy and reducing operating costs compared with traditional horticulture technologies.
ProGrowTech Evolve Series LED EV700
Features:
Evolve EV700 is the true HPS killer, outperforming the highest end solutions. With enough intensity to maximize yields for the heartiest strains, the industrial-grade EV700 is the ultimate fixture for the flowering phase, enabling producers to increase yield, quality, and energy efficiency. Massive 4'x4' footprint, which means more even light distribution across the canopy. 700watts yet out-competes 1000w HPS in PPFD. Runs incredibly cool in temp. Lower light temps = less HVAC run-time and less electricity cost.This grow light can be automated (not included computer component) to create Sunrise/Sunset fade-in/fade-out each day
Whether you’re new to growing indoors altogether or just new to growing plants with LED plant lights, you may not be familiar with some of the unique characteristics of LED lighting. Here are the main factors you want to check on when purchasing LED horticultural lights for your plants grow.
The factors are listed in no particular order. Only you can know which one is most important to you, given your specific growing situation.
Real Wattage And Theoretical Wattage
You may have noticed that most LED lights have two different wattage figures. One of these is the potential wattage and the other the actual wattage. The potential wattage is the wattage the light could run at if the LED chips were running at full power. For example, a light with two hundred 3w LEDs has a potential wattage of 600.
LED chips are never run at full power, though. Doing so would considerably shorten their life span. Generally, they are run at 50 to 60% of their potential power. This is their real wattage and is the amount of electricity the light will actually consume.
The 600 watt LED grow light from the example above would probably have a power draw of 300 to 400 watts. And lights listed as 300w don’t actually have a power draw anywhere near that much either, especially if it’s a Chinese brand (they tend to exaggerate a lot).
Light Spectrum
Most indoor horticultural LED lights use LEDs in multiple colors. The majority will be various shades of red and blue, with the better lights also using some white LEDs as well as some infrared and ultra-violet ones.
This mix of colors gives you all the light plants, need for every stage of growth: cloning, veg and bloom. It is referred to as full-spectrum light and is generally what you want.
If you are looking for a light to only grow clones or to just veg plants, then you might want to check out one with mostly blue LEDs. If you are looking for a light to supplement your existing setup to give your plants a boost during the flowering stage, you’ll want one with mostly red LEDs.
Finally, I need to mention all-white LED fixtures. These lights use only white LED, which gives them a spectrum similar to natural sunlight (which is also a mix of the HPS and metal halide spectra). Proponents of white light claim it is best for plants, because it gives them the light they are used to from the sun.
More and more, the indoor plants industry as a whole is moving toward white light. White LED grow light fixtures are becoming much more common on the market as a result.
And white light does work well to grow and flower plants. But it includes a lot of light in the yellow and green ranges, which is light plants do not use much during photosynthesis. Thus, it goes to waste, right?
That has been the case made by manufacturers (and fans) of fixtures with mostly red and blue LED lights. They say these are more efficient, because you are not using any of the electricity you paid for to produce light that plants don’t want.
But plants do want that light. Sure, they don’t want as much of it as they do of light in the red and blue wavelengths, but they do still want it. That is why the best-selling LED grow lights these days all include white LEDs on their lights. And many use mostly white LED light.
Light Intensity
For LED lights, the most widely used measure of intensity is PAR (technically, it is PPFD and not PAR, but most still refer to it as PAR). It stands for Photosynthetically Active Radiation and is used to measure the amount of light in the wavelengths that plants use for photosynthesis. Some brands will list the lumen output, but that isn’t all that useful for grow lights.
Some brands give PAR readings for their indoor plant lights; others do not. Those that do often only give one value, which doesn’t really tell you much about its effectiveness for vegetative growing, much less blooming.
That value was taken dead center beneath the light. A large value here means you have a powerful light in the middle of the coverage area, but it tells you nothing about the strength of the light around the edges.
Ideally, manufacturers will provide a PAR footprint that shows PAR readings throughout the coverage area. Most do not do this, however, so you will often have to look to tests done by third parties, such as review sites, for this information. For white LED lights, lumen output can have some value. For others, it is mostly useless.
Coverage Area
This refers to the area a grow light can cover while still providing enough light for the plants in that space. For the flowering stage of growth, plants need more light, so you will have to move the light fixtures closer to the canopy. This increases the intensity, but also decreases the coverage area.
This is why LED lights have a smaller coverage area for the flowering stage than they do for vegging. Always make sure the space given by the manufacturer is for blooming, unless you only plan to veg with your light.
Cooling System
Te best LED grow lights give off far less heat than HID bulbs, but powerful LED diodes still emit enough heat that they require cooling. Any larger LED fixture must have heat sinks to reduce the amount of heat emitted and internal fans to disperse whatever heat remains.
You want to make sure that a LED light’s cooling fans and heat sinks are adequate for the amount and strength of diodes in contains. If it isn’t, this will considerably shorten the life span of the LED chips and make them far less efficient.
Another issue to consider is noise. Fans can generate a lot of noise, so fixtures with multiple fans will be much louder than you might think.
When you add their noise to that of oscillating fans and exhaust vans for your tent, you can end up with a fairly high noise level. If this is a concern, consider a fixture with fewer, or even no, fans.
Are you planning to purchase LED grow lights anytime soon? Share us your thoughts below!
October 20, 2023