We would suggest you contact the manufacturer of your lights to get specific recommendations Best, Klaus. Thanks a lot for this information. As far as I can fathom you are one of the few people who actually talk about what really matters.
Reading other comments as well, most producers are focusing on wattage — which as you rightly pointed out — is a consumption unit. And at least in my researches most producers do not publish micromoles data but focus on wattage.
Gaga, You are welcome! Thank you for the feedback. We have been fighting the idea that is takes watts to grow since we started LED Habitats. We recently shipped an order to Dubai, our customer used Aramax as a freight forwarding service. Hi Scott, Depending on plant size, we recommend one light for every plants. You can also grow up to seedlings with just one of our w Root Max lights. Klaus you have some great info here!
They are aglex w and have leds with spectrums for both veg and flowering. However they recomend to run both sets of leds when flowering why is this? Wouldnt the flowering plants not gain a lot from the veg spectrum? Hi Jesse, typically veg lights lean more into the blue spectrum and flower lights are more in the red spectrum.
Flowering plants can also benefit from a higher micrromole output. LED Habitats gives plants the best spectrum and all the light energy plants need for flowering with the Ditto Max Light, all with only one on and off button. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Do you need W to grow indoors? Where the myth that you need W to grow hemp comes from The idea that we need watts to grow hemp comes from the days when it was common to use High Pressure Sodium HPS lights to grow anything indoors. How much wattage do you need to grow indoors?
I built a grow fixture with led tv backlights, for seedlings by a window till they can go outside. Seems to be helping. Is there a downside to those types of leds for that application? Hello, could I use this for plant growing? My daughter is doing a three month science project for school and need 2 grow lights that will work and are cheap… I have experienced the differences between led lights and some of them are trash.
She just needs to plants some seeds and have them grow. Any recommendations for lights that will get the job done? Burple is the humorous name given to the limited spectrum lights that use specific red and blue wavelengths that appear a sick purplish hue on the plants. I have done fine with broader spectrum lights that include those wavelengths and thus are nice to look at my orchids and natural looking.
Maybe not as efficient totally, but much more pleasant and I get great results in our low light winters in the PNW. I also have a small aloe plant that could use some extra light. I am ready to rip my hair out trying to understand and figure out what exactly I need in terms of how many lights, how big a fixture, and strength of the bulbs. The problem is that indoor lights are not very suited for tall plants, especially ones that want a lot of light.
To grow them properly you probably need several good quality grow lights — which will be expensive. Check out some suggests from pot growers — they grow taller plants that need high light. Personally, I would use a widow. I build my own set ups for quite a bit less. There are the COBs that have a built integrated circuit, so you just need to supply Vac to it with no transformer.
I cool by having them mounted on extruded aluminum pipe that I run water through them with a bucket of water and a cheap hydronic water pump. For tall plants, I would mount some vertically to cover the sides of the plants so the lower foliage gets light. Seen this done with commercial set ups also. Pulsing the LEDs seems to yield about double the efficiency at the plant, by the way. Surprised no one has ventured into this.
Thank-you for a straight forward helpful approach —beyond simple chart equivalencies. As always, Thank you Robert for this post. This is a company you will want to research if you do additional posts about LED. Not to promote them leave that to me! If you have contacts there — I am looking for some technical information I was not able to find online. Also, any suggestions for a quantum meter if I were to buy one? I have not measured them, and could not find any values on line.
Amazing article…I found LED lighting is truly the next generation of technology which features various benefits to consumers. Your information is WAY behind the curve. And using watts I agree, is a meaningless metric that tells you nothing about the light.
Yet the metrics that do, people are too lazy to bother to learn and so, people continue to buy inefficient, poorly made, and sometimes UNSAFE lighting!
A fire waiting to happen! So educate your a little better before posting an article like this, your about 4 year behind the curve! It was a great post. Very Helpful. Thanks so much for this timely article. I appreciate your ability to take a subject that just might make my head explode and put it into graspable context. I have a light meter which measures PAR which are the wavelengths that plants use for growth. This is a good way to test these lights.
Light falloff can be an additional problem depending on design. I use 3 watt units in greenhouse for winter light for citrus and veggies which has worked quite well. I agree we need better labeling and for anything other than seedlings people need to think about exactly how to mount lights. There are many high tech commercial greenhouses that rely exclusively on LED lights with great results.
So they can work if you get the right ones and are careful about how you mount them. So narrow, in fact, that a different recipe for light seems to be needed for op- timum growth of different kinds of plants, or different stages of growth. Performance is generally enhanced with the addition of a small amount of light in the green as well as far-red spectrum the part of the electromagnetic spectrum just beyond the red that we can see, but shorter wavelength than infra-red.
It is therefore monochromatic. Then I discovered that a white LED emits that light for exactly the same reason as a fluorescent tube. Its monochromatic radiation is in the ultraviolet UV , and the white light is a combination of emissions of phosphors energised by the UV photons. Madder still, phosphors that emit in the green range are rather a waste for indoor plant lighting. It is interesting that you say they are monochromatic — that is what I would have expected.
The light is not monochromatic at least not the light that reaches the plant. They are quite wide spectras, and nowhere near being several monochromatic lines. It turns out that green light is actually used by plants and can be an important component of the light they get. If Round-up affects plant by being absorbed by leaves, why does painting cut trunk or root surfaces damage weeds? Works great and the price is right. As a matter of interest I used one of these grow lamps.
It was fantastic. A huge difference…. This could be achieved by either one lamp or several lamps. These would be ideal conditions. Plants will naturally also grow under less than ideal conditions but possibly not quite to their fullest potential. Further reducing light to W or W would, however, significantly reduce yield.
Some lamps come with focusing lenses which give high intensity underneath the lamp but low intensity farther away from the center. Light intensities below PPFD drive photosynthesis poorly. In general, seedlings need 16 to 18 hours of light per day. Typically, grow lights or lamps are positioned 4 to 6 inches from the tops of seedlings and raised as the seedlings grow to maintain a consistent distance.
Remember that watts is NOT a measure of light output. Also, wattage can vary widely, between different light types LED vs. HID and manufacturers. However, a rule of thumb is to use lights that are 10 — 30 watts , where you can use fewer watts for low-light plants, and more watts for plants that require high light.
An easy way to gauge whether your LED light provides enough light is to observe how your seedlings are growing. Gardeners typically use two types of CFLs, soft white and daylight, which cover the entire plant growth cycle. Daylight bulbs with a color temperature of 5, to 6,K are recommended for seedlings. A general recommendation is to start with two or watt fluorescent bulbs.
Grow lights are a good supplement for succulents, particularly in parts of the country or during seasons when they cannot receive sufficient sunlight. Watts are a measure of energy used.
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