June 13, 2022
When talking about grow rooms, you must keep a check on several things, especially when it comes to the temperature controller and the humidity regulators. But, one item that is a make or breaks for these grow tents is the LED grow lights. They are cheap and they get the work done in ensuring optimal winter growth and preventing the risks of damage to the variety of crops that you are likely growing.
With the growing popularity of grow lights in the market, you must keep a check on the quality of the product and the kind of price range they come with. But, when it comes to buying grow lights, there is one thing that everyone is skeptical about and that is the price. The majority of the high-end grow lights are expensive, which means that they will dig a hole in your bank account.
But, with diversifying customer base, even brands are coming out with products that can suffice the needs of every user in the market. Some of the grow lights now come with cheaper quality yet sustainable materials that make them last longer than you can imagine.
When looking through the internet for the best LED grow lights, we came across a few ones that are cheap and won’t dig a hole in your pocket. So, we thought we’d list out the best ones that you wouldn’t regret splurging out on.
Here are a few important and cheap LED grow lights that you wouldn’t regret spending your money on.
How do you get sufficient light for houseplants and indoor garden areas? Here are 3 tips on how to best set up your space.
Consider your indoor garden plot. Whether it’s a single shelf, a basement area, or an entire room, look at how much space you have. Pot plants and beddings accordingly.
Depending on the type of plant, group the pots or trays 4 to 8 inches apart to allow for growth and easy access for pruning and care.
You’ll also want to make sure you purchase lights that will illuminate your entire plantings area. You may need more than one bulb or light source to fully cover your growing area. Depending on the size, you may only need to use only one light for houseplants, or you may need more.
Features:
Pro-Tech Lighting is committed to producing the most reliable and performance LED plant growth lights on the market for wholesale, indoor planting, and large-scale gardening projects. The foldable and powerful Pro Tech 6450W LED is a linear multi-strip fixture that can produce a high PPF of 1200 µmol/s and a photon efficiency (fixture efficiency) of 2.8 µmol/J. The 645w Pro-Tech LED plant growth light is manufactured with top-notch components, including high-quality Pro-Tech drivers and high-quality LEDs from Samsung and Osram. For different cultivars, breeding, and vegetative growth periods, the light can be dimmed without loss of efficiency. The high-efficiency and low-power LED configuration with LED bars reduce the temperature of the LEDs, thereby increasing output and improving light maintenance.
Features:
The Jungle LED grow light was designed to be efficient and easy to install right out of the box. With a variety of power cord length options, whether you are looking to mount the LED driver on the side of a rack or on the fixture itself, Jungle G6/630W comes with simple snap-lock connectors that make reconnecting cables quick and swift. The Jungle LED system retains an IP65 wet-location rating along with its corrosion resistance build will accommodate installation in your grow space with minimal limitations. Jungle LED G6/630 offers a high-performance light solution, delivering a full-cycle spectrum for vegetative growth and bloom stages to cede a more robust yield. The detachable design of Jungle G6’s power supply (LED driver) provides the flexibility of remote mounting onto most vertical rack systems without adding attachments or modification to your existing space.
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, including 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.
There are a few exceptions. 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.
Using grow lights is a great way to ensure your plants get the light they need to grow. Grow lights provide many benefits for indoor hydroponic gardens and are a great way to get the most out of your plants.
No matter what grow light type you choose, make sure it emits the right light spectrum for the plants you want to grow. Each plant has different light requirements, so it’s essential to know them before purchasing a grow light.
With so many options on the market, you’re sure to find a grow light that will work for your indoor garden and budget.
October 20, 2023