A guide to grow lights.
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Thanks to major innovations in lighting technology, farmers and home gardeners have been able to move the planting efforts indoors for some time. This was accomplished by the development of various types of full spectrum plant lighting. These lights include incandescent, fluorescent, high intensity discharge (HID), and more recently, the light emitting diode (LED) grow lights.
Incandescent bulbs are typically the cheapest but the lest functional of all of the grow lights available. They do not require the electrical ballasts that the fluorescent and HID lamps require but they have a low lumen output per watt. This would imply that in the longer run an incandescent system is more expensive to run.
Fluorescent grow lights are the next cheapest category of lighting. They offer a more energy efficient lumens to watt ratio, have better color rendition properties, and don’t produce nearly as much heat as incandescent or HID bulbs. Fluorescent grow lights come primarily in two varieties, power compact florescent and T5, both of which are perfectly suitable grow lights.
High intensity discharge lamps are the most efficient lumen per watt bulb however; they also are the most expensive of the grow lights and produce the most heat. Some of the HID lights are deficient in the blue spectrum and typically need some additional supplementation from either sunlight or a bulb that falls within that spectrum range.
HID lights come in several varieties, Metal Halide (MH), and High Pressure Sodium (HPS) are two types. MH lights are usually used during a plants grow cycle, ie when the plant is not blooming or bearing fruit, while the HPS lamps are using during the bloom/fruit cycle.
Finally, LED grow lamps are a recent addition to the field. Cost aside, they have several distinct advantages to the other grow lamps: they produce no heat, they are amazingly efficient, their wavelengths can be tuned as needed for optimal growing, and they have a terrifically long lifespan of nearly 100,000 hours while most other lamps need to replaced between 12 and 18 months.
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