Growing plants indoors is not entirely new, and modern indoor hydroponics can provide each plant with the exact amount of nutrients, water, and light needed to optimize the plant’s growth throughout the year. LED grow light plays a vital role in the whole process.
In the modern indoor planting room, technologies such as carbon dioxide concentration, drip irrigation and nutrient delivery system are adopted to plant higher quality and more cannabis.
That is to say, one of the most important factors of any indoor planting is lighting. In this article we discuss how do grow lights work, but not only. Hope it will help you.
What is Indoor Horticulture?
In essence, indoor gardening is to grow plants indoors. Under the influence of multiple factors such as frequent extreme weather, the continuous spread of the novel coronavirus and global food shortage, it has inadvertently become the greatest driving force for the awakening of national health consciousness.
Indoor planting, plant factories and vertical farms are vigorously carried out around the world.
A plant factory is an efficient agricultural system. It enables the annual planned production of crops in a vertical three-dimensional space through high precision environmental control, using manual control of complementary light levels, environmental control (humidity, temperature and gas) and fertilizer irrigation, under completely enclosed or semi-enclosed conditions.
What Role do LED Grow Light Play?
The sun provides energy for life to develop and flourish. The first thing you have to do when you grow indoors is how you are going to replicate it. That said, one of the most important factors of any indoor planting is lighting. Compared with HPS lamps, LED grow lights have a higher initial investment.
It is related to the fact that LED plant lights use a full spectrum. However, in the long run, LED plant lights are more attractive and play an equally important role in promoting crop growth and improving agricultural production efficiency.
In view of the fact that the quality and attributes of the LED plant lights are excellent, they have become a very popular light fixture used by greenhouse farmers and cannabis growers. Commercial LED grow light is also highly regarded for their long service life, the low waste of heat generated, and their full-spectrum capacity as previously described.
What are LED Grow Lights? How do LED Plant Lights Work?
LED grow light is an energy-efficient fixture, which is used as the only light or supplementary light source for indoor growing or greenhouses, respectively. Its efficiency applies to its ability to convert electrical energy into useful photons that fall in the PAR region of the spectrum.
LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) are small electronic components made of two different types of semiconductor materials, one with a negative charge called electrons and the other with a positive charge called holes.
When a voltage is properly applied to the LED, current begins to flow through it, causing the electrons and holes to begin colliding, releasing energy in the form of photons, light quanta, in a process called compounding.
What is Full Spectrum Lighting and How does Spectrum Affect Plant Growth?
The full spectrum light is the light that covers the electromagnetic spectrum of all wavelengths from infrared to near-ultraviolet or is useful for plant or animal life. Full-spectrum light means that it contains all the colors in the electromagnetic wavelengths necessary for photosynthesis.
This includes blue light, violet light, red light, yellow light, green light, visible and invisible light, from infrared to ultraviolet and more.
The distribution of the spectrum is important to optimize plant growth because different wavelengths can affect different parts of the growth cycle.
Plants such as cannabis, tomatoes, peppers, and strawberries have different light requirements, but the spectrum tends to affect plants in the following ways:
UV (280-400nm) — Enhances plant defenses and helps fight disease.
Blue (400-500nm) — Stimulates leaf/root growth and inhibits stem elongation.
Green (500-600nm) — Inhibit nutrients, such as anthocyanins.
Red (600-700nm) — Stimulates flowering, fruiting and germination.
Far-red (700-800nm) — Stimulates stem elongation.
At Auxgrow, each of our LED grow lights comes with a detailed spec sheet to help you learn more about the performance.
Do LED Plant Lights Work for Cannabis Cultivation?
Actually, you can grow any kind of plant with LED grow lights. It is definitely worth the money. Commercial LED grow light is now powerful enough, both full spectrum and customizable spectrum.
At Auxgrow, there is a plant light with UV that enhances red and blue light, enhancing the spectrum of each stage.
Choosing appropriate product parameters, LED plant grow lights will provide larger and thicker results than HID or high-pressure sodium lamps. You can expect a yield of about 0.5 to 1g/W with high-quality LED planting lights and an average-to-good grow. Autoflower needs high-quality lighting.
Put another way, your autos will appreciate LED light waves and help them drive photosynthesis.
While not all LEDs emit all wavelengths, you can find full spectrum LED grow light fixture that is sure to have an impact on your harvest. Cannabis plants produce trichomes to protect the flowers from UV damage, as this is where the seeds develop.
If you grow with quality LEDs, your plants will end up with more resin and denser buds than bulbs.
Advantages of LED Plant Lights
At the early stage, LED technology was considered quite impractical. With the new grow light technology advances, the production of LED plant grow lights has become cost-effective. The range of available LED chip types has facilitated the development of a more efficient plant cultivation industry.
LED wins in terms of energy efficiency, quality of cultivated plants and environmental friendliness when set side-by-side with conventional HPS system.
In the long run, HPS lamps are more expensive than led plant lamps because of their short service life. The heat from HPS lamps is sometimes good and effective in a greenhouse, but not for indoor vertical farms.
Do Grow Lights Work?
- Greater light spread and uniformity: Higher spread generated photons allow for better uniformity on plants.
- Full-spectrum lighting: LED grow lights can produce the full spectrum, which is great for improving plant growth efficiency.
- Customizable Spectrum: At Auxgrow, LED growth spectrum can be made to have spectra that target specific objectives, such as anthocyanin accumulation, flowering inhibition, root enhancement, etc., depending on the crop you are growing.
- Longer service life: HPS grow lights can last up to 1 year, while LEDs can even last up to 8 years (equivalent to 50, 000 hours of use), saving your money on operating costs.
- The safer growing environment: LED plant lights emit less heat and LED lights add UV light, so there’s less chance of bacteria and mold forming. This means fewer pesticides and less environmental pollution.
- Economical power consumption: LED plant grow lights use 50% of the energy used by HPS systems, which means less power consumption.
- Multiple sizes: LEDs are ideal for a variety of lighting applications. Because they can come in a variety of sizes, plant lights can be sized to meet the home growing, greenhouse growing and plant factories.
- Better crops: LED grow lights that actually work for plants. Compared to HPS lights, LED plant lights produce better crops in terms of plants getting bigger and growing faster.
- Friendlier to the environment: Many forms of lighting, such as HID, contain harmful substances, such as mercury, while LED lights do not.
What LED lights are Best for Growing?
It is the only way to plant high-quality plants by choosing high-quality lighting. The most important point when choosing an LED plant light is that it gives you high output with less input. Another major concern is the spectrum.
In an ideal situation, you need a fixture that provides light in every color of the visible spectrum as well as infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. It comes with peaks in the red and blue wavelengths. The coverage area is also important. This means not only the area that the light can cover but also how evenly it covers that area.
You need to do a lot of research to buy a lamp that suits your settings. LEDs are available in a variety of sizes and wattages, and the differences in cost and features can be mind-boggling.
As an example, one brand of 300W light can cost anywhere from $80 to $100. And the larger brands offering the same price at $350.
Keep in mind that not always more expensive LED grow lights are better. So which LED grow lights that actually work will best meet all of these requirements? You can click here to see our various types of LED plant lights.
