January 16, 2023
With so many options on the market, finding the best LED grow lights for your indoor garden can understandably be tricky.
LED grow lights are becoming more and more popular in indoor gardening and hydroponic systems. They offer many advantages over traditional HID (High-Intensity Discharge) lighting, including lower energy consumption, less heat output and a longer lifetime.
But that doesn’t simplify things when it comes to choosing the right product for your indoor gardening needs. There are dozens of options on the market, with different features, coverage, light intensities, and designs, and it can be overwhelming.
We’ve compiled this complete guide to the best LED grow lights 2023 to help you find the right light for your indoor garden and requirements.
A professional light bulb can bring a lot of light energy to plants, so naturally, you will think that it needs a lot of electricity.
Indeed, commercial growers with thousands of plants to care for may incur huge electricity costs.
But for ordinary indoor gardeners or small indoor greenhouses, the monthly cost of running a single greenhouse LED grow light with medium power may be as low as one or two dollars per month.
Service Time
It seems obvious but compared with lighting the lamp for 6 hours a day, lighting the lamp for 12 hours a day will consume twice the energy.
Power Consumption
Some small greenhouse grow lights are quite low in power, and only 10 watts are used when they are used. Others can easily consume 100 watts or more (ten times).
Spider Farmer SE7000 730W Full Spectrum LED Grow Light
Features:
This Spider Farmer LED grow light features a uniquely designed extension of 8 bars to provide more even and complete canopy coverage, especially in outer edge planting areas. With 2688 SAMSUNG LM301B diodes, the SE7000 Led Grow Light consumes 730 watts at 2045 umol/s, achieving an impressive PPE of 2.8 umol/J. The full spectrum (3200–4200K, 4800–5000k, 650–665nm) is ideal for vegetable flowering to suit every stage of the plant cycle. The dimmer knob is ideal for growers to adjust the light intensity for different growth stages. The strip grow light design and the aluminium radiator on the back contribute to better airflow and good heat dissipation. The LED diodes are coated with water repellent, so there is no need to worry about a wet environment.
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.
Spectrum
First, we need to talk about the growth spectrum. This is basically the wavelength produced by a light source, such as the sun or LED lights. As a spectrum, there is a range of wavelengths that growers are most interested in affecting plant growth — these wavelengths include UV radiation, the visible portion of the spectrum (including photosynthetically active radiation or PAR), and far-red radiation.
Plants use light in the PAR part of the spectrum for photosynthesis, which is fairly easy for growers to discern.
In plants, chlorophyll — which converts light energy into chemical energy — absorbs primarily red and blue light during photosynthesis. Red and blue light also occur in the PAR range of the spectrum.
Some 5 billion years of DNA from the sun have been stored in plants — we can’t be naive enough to think we know everything now. Full-spectrum LED lights best mimic sunlight.
Daily light interval
A daily light interval is a fancy way of saying when lights are on and when they are off — or when your plants are “sleeping” and when they are “awake.”
As plants grow and mature, how much light they need changes. Younger plants need more light over a longer period of time, while older plants can survive in less light — but they need more intense light.
That’s the advantage of full-spectrum LED lights. Full-spectrum LED lights more closely mimic the sun because, as the name suggests, they include all the colors in the spectrum.
If you’re growing plants, young plants need more blue light, while flowering plants need more red light. This is where full-spectrum light can benefit growers, as they use artificial light to help plants grow more efficiently.
Use Artificial Light
Growers use artificial light to help plants grow bigger and better. This is when full-spectrum LED lights will come into play, so humans can help nature by emphasizing what plants need at precise times to influence better outcomes. This is why you probably don’t want plants in different stages to be under the same light, as they don’t need to be at the same intensity at the same time.
Full Spectrum LEDs
It can be said that LED lights are new things on the street. And there’s been a debate about which is better: LED or HID? In fact, plants grow well under either condition, but recent research has shown that LEDs have evolved to the point where they now perform better under LED lights. Indoor plants in particular tend to benefit more from green light (as we mentioned above). Since LED lights emit much more green light than HID lights, it becomes a matter of preference and cost.
When looking for grow lights for houseplants, it is essential to consider various factors. But at the end of the day, the best grow lights for your plants are the ones that meet their specific needs. Whether you’re looking for grow lights, consider the size and type of plants you’re growing, as well as the size of your growing space. Remember, it’s best to consult an expert for the best advice for your situation.
October 20, 2023